Not sure what the impossibility is. VPN's have a set of exit relays. If traffic is coming from one of those exit relays, it's coming from a VPN, so adult websites can be required to block traffic from those exit relays. What am I missing?
The law likely violates the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition on passing laws that significantly burden businesses and people outside Utah’s borders.
SB 73 burdens the rights of all internet users outside of Utah because it requires adult websites to either know every visiting user’s physical location, and then block those in Utah, or to verify every visitor’s age just in case they might be in Utah.
I still suspect there's some kind of solution. Like Utah could tell VPN providers that if they service a customer in Utah then the VPN provider can't route traffic to adult sites. Or put the burden on the VPN provider to do age verification if porn is gonna be available through the VPN.
Come to think of it, I'm still a bit confused as to why VPNs are even relevant because it would seem to me that age verification would be done through some kind of having-credit-card type scheme which VPNs are entirely irrelevant to. I even read the article and I'm still confused. Oh well.
| An individual is considered to be accessing the website from this state if the individual is actually located in the state, regardless of whether the individual is using a virtual private network, proxy server, or other means to disguise or misrepresent the individual's geographic location to make it appear that the individual is accessing a website from a location outside this state.
But how can any site check if a client is a) a VPN client (typically this can be known because VPN exit node IPs can be learned), __and__ b) in Utah?
The impossibility lies in (b). Effectively this forces any affected companies having a nexus to the state of Utah to forbid VPN clients. I think that's a bit too far-reaching. It would be much more practicable instead to ask VPNs to disallow Utah client exits to affected sites w/o age checks -- VPN services aren't free, so VPNs basically can do age checks.
Given that this could have been written to be feasibly implemented, either this text was written to cause a controversy, or this text was written by people who don't know how things work. Either way, this text cannot be enforceable as written. The Utah legislature can easily modify this to be enforceable (see above), so it's not like a court striking this down might be playing partisan games just by striking it down.
It's impossible to have perfect knowledge of the entire set of VPN exit node addresses.
It also seems to me like Utah could just demand that adult sites only accept traffic from residential ips.
Utah can't tell businesses that service the country (or the world) how to do anything in this regard. You can't demand a list of the VPN exit nodes, because no VPN would ever give you that, and if they're outside of your jurisdiction, how could you possibly enforce it (assuming you got the Feds to agree with your law regulating interstate/international commerce now). You can't tell websites to only accept residential traffic, for the same reasons.
The internet sorta fucks states rights (in a good way).
Besides, there's no such thing as "residential" IPs. If I set a VPN gate at my mum's house, how would the porn company know?
The "impossibility" is in them saying "we cannot guarantee with 100% certainty that the user isn't using a VPN" and that's correct, they can't - but the law has no provision for that, they are risking fines over something they cannot control.