Utah's newestage verification lawgoes live on 6 May, and it is doing something no US state has tried before. Lawmakers are no longer just targeting adult websites. They are targeting the privacy tools people use to get around them.
What is being tested in Utah is not simply whether minors can be blocked from porn sites, but whether anonymous browsing itself can survive the next wave of internet regulation.
Utah lawmakers also imposed a 2% tax on porn websites and hefty fines forviolating age-verification requirements.
Senate Bill 73, formally titled theOnline Age Verification Amendments, requires websites hosting a 'substantial portion of material harmful to minors' to verify the age of users accessing those platforms from Utah.
Users, predictably, found the workaround quickly. VPNs.
A virtual private network masks a user's IP address and routes traffic through another location, making a Utah resident appear to be browsing from Nevada, Canada or virtually anywhere else. That technical dodge has undermined state-by-state age verification efforts for months.
Utah's answer is unusually blunt. Under SB 73, a user is legally considered to be accessing a website from Utah if they are physically in Utah, regardless of whether they are using a VPN, proxy server or any other tool designed to disguise location. Covered sites are also barred from offering instructions on how to use VPNs to bypass checks.
This is the core problem critics keep returning to. A VPN is specifically built to conceal where a user is connecting from.
If a website sees traffic arriving from a server in Switzerland, or New York, or Amsterdam, it has no reliable technical method of determining whether the person behind that connection is secretly sitting in Salt Lake City.
Yet Utah's law places liability on the website, not the user.
Source: International Business Times UK
