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“The internet is built to, and will always, route around censorship. If Utah successfully hampers commercial VPN providers, motivated users will transition to n
by Barbing 6mo ago
“The internet is built to, and will always, route around censorship. If Utah successfully hampers commercial VPN providers, motivated users will transition to non-commercial proxies, private tunnels through cloud services like AWS, or residential proxies that are virtually indistinguishable from standard home traffic. These workarounds will emerge within hours of the law taking effect. Meanwhile, the collateral damage will fall on businesses, journalists, and survivors of abuse who rely on commercial VPNs for essential data security.
These provisions won't stop a tech-savvy teenager, but they certainly will impact the privacy of every regular Utah resident who just wants to keep their data out of the hands of brokers or malicious actors.”
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/utahs-new-law-regulating-vpns-goes-effect-next-week https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/utahs-new-law-regulati... (incl. donation link)
Utah legislators should know the reason the EFF makes this statement is that it’s true.
- chrisweekly 6mo agoPerfect quote. Thanks for sharing it!
- lxgr 6mo agoA nice idea in theory, but would you seriously argue that all the Internet censorship in several countries has been completely without effects? A law doesn't need to be impossible to circumvent to cause great damage.
- Barbing 6mo agoIt can, right. One effect’s directly listed (“the collateral damage will fall on businesses, journalists, and survivors of abuse who rely on commercial VPNs for essential data security.”)
- bigbadfeline 6mo ago> Utah legislators should know the reason the EFF makes this statement is that it’s true. Well, it's not true, and Utah's legislators know better than the EFF. The whole idea that political restrictions can be fixed by technical means is a scam. Simply put, today Utah - tomorrow the universe. This didn't start in Utah and it won't end there. The piecemeal removal of privacy and freedoms has reached an advanced stage and one of the major factors that made it possible is the misplaced faith in circumvention by technical means.
- Barbing 6mo agoI see what you mean. Within hours workarounds WILL be implemented, but they aren't perfect, aren't for all of us, and won't work forever.
- jasomill 6mo agoUnfortunately, these efforts will continue so long as the idea that "if I'm not doing anything wrong, I have nothing to hide" remains commonplace. The optimist in me hopes that attempts to censor popular and relatively harmless content like pornography will discredit this notion for good, sort of like how Internet commerce put to rest the idea that cryptography was only useful for governments, corporations, and bad actors.