Utah's VPN law demands a technical impossibility
Problem
Utah's new VPN law forces service providers to either block all VPN traffic or withdraw from the state entirely. Because reliably identifying VPN traffic is technically infeasible, users cannot access restricted services lawfully, and companies face legal and compliance challenges.
Pain points
- The dilemma of either blocking all VPN traffic or exiting the market
- Inability to reliably distinguish VPN from normal traffic, causing over‑blocking
- Legal pressure resulting in self‑censorship and potential First Amendment violations
Questions to verify
- Would you be willing to pay for such a service?
- Do you currently have any workaround to bypass the law?
- Would you need an automatic tool that detects and switches to non‑VPN traffic?
Evidence
quote / 引用 · @Anonymous / 匿名
Reminds me of a funny story of how russian government faced the same paradox, and they solved it in the most elegant way – all foreign traffic equals VPN, all foreign traffic is forbidden. Russian people outside of russia literallt can't access state services without a "reverse-vpn" now.If you think they will stop at a mere "technical impossibility" I have bad news for you folks, they will just ban all the traffic they can't track, in Utah, UK, anywhere;)
quote / 引用 · @Anonymous / 匿名
> platforms are left with an impossible choice: completely block all VPN traffic nationwide or withdraw access from Utah entirelyIs it even possible to reliably know that a connection is from a VPN? Anyone can proxy through a random hosting provider.
quote / 引用 · @Anonymous / 匿名
> As we’ve said time and time again: the internet will always route around censorship.Is this still true, or has it become a truism? It seems nations like Iran and China (and events like Kashmir come to mind) have progressed the state-of-the-art and playbook to where we can't actually say it definitively will route around it.
Disclaimer: this card is distilled by AI from community discussions as “pain point evidence”. It is a starting point for need analysis and validation, not a “validated market need”. AI has analytical limits; please open the original discussion above to manually verify before key decisions.