Utah first state to hold websites liable for users who mask their location with VPNs — law goes into effect, designed to prevent bypassing age checks

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Utah's Online Age Verification Amendments, formally Senate Bill 73, take effect on May 6, making the state the first in the U.S. to explicitly target VPN use as part of age verification legislation.Signed by Governor Spencer Cox on March 19, the controversial law establishes that a user is considered to be accessing a website from Utah if they are physically located there, regardless of whether they use a VPN or proxy to mask their IP address. It also prohibits covered websites from sharing instructions on how to use a VPN to bypass age checks.Article continues below The law is also technically flawed, given that it assumes that a web provider can reliably detect VPN traffic and determine a user’s true physical location — they can’t. IP reputation databases such as MaxMind and IP2Proxy can flag traffic from known datacenter IP ranges, but commercial VPN providers rotate addresses constantly, and residential VPN endpoints are largely indistinguishable from standard home connections. Autonomous System Number analysis can catch traffic originating from datacenter networks, but can’t identify a personal WireGuard tunnel running on a cloud VPS, for example, which routes through the same infrastructure as ordinary web hosting.

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Luke James is a freelance writer and journalist.  Although his background is in legal, he has a personal interest in all things tech, especially hardware and microelectronics, and anything regulatory.