Do we think VPNs will ever be banned in a state like Utah?
[0] https://www.fox13now.com/2018/12/11/walmart-joins-the-push-f...
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/686...
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.
Payment would still be a problem.
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.
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.
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 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.