A few years ago, Walmart stopped stocking (some) beer in Utah because it was too difficult for them to bother getting the 3.2% alcohol by weight beer which had been the limit in Utah at the time[0]. Ultimately Utah's legislature decided to change the 3.2% restriction. I suspect this will go that way; more services will just say that they don't need to serve that population and move on. There will be a lot of people saying they like using their VPN totally because it keeps me private online and VPNs will just be normalized.
It will certainly be interesting to see. Utah is an interesting case because generally speaking high percentages of the population will praise and promote "freedom" and "liberty." Of course with humans often stated/conscious beliefs and actions are often disjointed, but there's still an interesting angle there where the state is a lot more limited on what it can do in the enforcement arena before people start pushing back.
That said though, porn access in Utah would be a hard one for the average person to stand up for because the social pressure there is immense (speaking from experience here). The dominant religion teaches that "free agency" is an important and indeed essential aspect of our lives. We are here on Earth to grow and develop and learn to make good (i.e. obedient to God) choices. They even believe that a War in Heaven happened that split the masses because Satan (aka the Devil) wanted to force people to be righteous, but Jesus' plan was to give them choice. You would think they'd be a bunch of libertarians then, but no they clearly believe that God shouldn't force you to be righteous, but the state should. Furthermore God has told their prophets that things like alcohol, marijuana, porn, are wicked and sinful. Reducing or eliminating your access to them is for your own good (and the good of "society") and is therefore justified. I've tried pointing out that when it comes to enforcing your morals on others it can literally be taken to China-level authoritarianism with the same justication of "good for society," but that never seems to get anywhere.
For those who are wondering, none of these things are "banned" though.
Drive around Salt Lake County, especially the city itself, and you'll see plenty of bars, signs offering cannabis medical cards, and even a strip club here or there. And some not bad breweries.
The state just seems to take the approach of waiting for sufficient demand for such things, then slowly adjusting to allow more, rather that just "have at it" for anything.
And of course, like everything in America, what the government really follows is the money -- they listen to business community demands, like allowing and increased number of bars where tourism and the local population demands, like at ski resorts, etc. Agreed that porn could be different though, since there's probably not a local business group advocating for preserving porn access
At pycon last week or so in Salt Lake City, I saw the bars are religious about scanning your id before you walk in. Every place that has a bar does it.
There's also restricted drink pours, and you must finish one drink before getting another. So like you can't order a double whiskey, nor can you order a regular martini -- although small ones are okay.
There’s also weird things about liquor licenses for “bars” in Utah. If you ever go back, ask any bar for their food menu and they’ll almost certainly bring one out. I’ve been told by a number of bartenders that only “restaurants” can get a liquor license (I’m sure that’s simplified). Then the culture of many such “restaurants” is indistinguishable from the culture of a bar.
The ID scanning is because of a local law, pretty blatantly intended to target ~bar~ “restaurant” hoppers, which was naturally only controversial with members of drinking culture. Sometimes I go to lunch at a local “bar” which has to scan my ID as soon as I walk in the door regardless of what I plan to order.
Ok, now you have me thinking about local people that would stand to financially benefit from internet porn being banned. Along the lines of does a internet porn ban drive more people to visiting strip clubs, etc.
This comment makes me glad that most of my interactions with Mormons have been from the other side of the fence, so to speak. I grew up in SLC suburbs and currently live in South Salt Lake but I was Methodist growing up, never LDS. So there was never really anybody close to me who was Mormon except until the age by which they'd learned not to try to defend their beliefs to non-Mormons.
To this point: "porn access in Utah would be a hard one for the average person to stand up for". I suspect that the arguments will be for online privacy even if the real intention is for porn access. But it's kinda more like you said: it will certainly be interesting to see.
Is the "TikTok ban" draft (RESTRICT Act) for consumers/regular people or only government personnel?
Aka, are they really going to ban TikTok for regular people or just make it so govenment personnel can't install TikTok on their device? aka, only ban TikTok for government people and not regular people
Hopefully the thing is going to fail and they are not going to do anything. But yes, it provides for banning government-choosen foreign sites entirely, with heavy penalties for assisting in circumventing blocks. (Although I guess VPN services could avoid it by filtering their users traffic themselves)
> it provides for banning government-choosen foreign sites entirely, with heavy penalties for assisting in circumventing blocks
I recently heard the argument that TikTok is a media control issue. Rupert Murdoch famously had to become an American to buy Fox. Applying that precedent seems cleaner than the RESTRICT Act.
It doesn't appear to have much to do with TikTok at all, from what I saw. It looks more like a regular old power grab by the federal government over tech generally, moving us towards censorship and overt surveillance and punishing circumvention.
Banning VPNs would be very difficult for a US state.
In China VPN restrictions are somewhat effective because of compliance from consumer platforms, ISPs and cloud service providers all operating inside a largely isolated pocket of the internet.
If any of those stakeholders refused to play along or could operate outside of enforcement range then the VPN ban would fail.
A ban isn’t truly impossible, especially with support from courts and the federal government, but I think it’s similar to the difficulty level of banning pirated content.
I doubt they try to ban them, but I could absolutely see them push an age verification requirement for "personal" VPNs that allow you to get an out-of-state IP address since it "illegally circumvents state laws". So you can have a VPN, but if you are in Utah the exit node must also be in Utah. Corporate VPNs wouldn't be a problem legally because they already verify your identify for state tax purposes so there's nothing more for corporate to do.
Bonus: while your every access to porn is being logged for the state, they can log your VPN use too just in case there is anything relevant for law enforcement to care about.
> I could absolutely see them push an age verification requirement for "personal" VPNs that allow you to get an out-of-state IP address
The VPN provider knows the user is in Utah and connecting to Pornhub, so there might be an argument for knowingly facilitating circumvention. No clue if that's something that they can prosecute, though. I'd be de-nexussing Utah were I running a VPN company.
I think they think they can just block them on a case-by-case basis, but that is harder than they think it is because IP bans will get most of AWS, and therefore the Internet blocked, and then the only option is an HTTPS MITM proxy, which would then break any site with cert pinning.
Past options that don't work anymore include SNI inspection (replaced with ESNI/ECH, but wasn't hard to circumvent; say you want good.com when you're doing SNI, say you want evil.com when sending a Host: header), and DNS blocks (but now DNS-over-HTTPS is a thing, so as difficult to control at the state level; would require a court to compel in-state DNS-over-HTTPS providers to publish fake facts, which violates federal law; but irrelevant because AWS, Cloudflare, and Google don't have any assets of value in Utah).
I'd say it's basically impossible to ban VPNs. If it happens, you'll see random VPN employees detained/arrested while on vacation or something like that, unless the news cycle blows over. China can do it, because they can just kill tech execs that won't cooperate, but we typically don't do that in the US.
The many (one would hope most?) tech and tech-adjacent businesses, the federal government, etc all require VPNs, so it would be hard to see how "ban VPNs for this already banned thing" would even work.
Probably not, but only because it would be too technologically complex for them to do. VPN companies don't operate in their jurisdiction and don't care about Utah law.
