I am completely baffled by this wave of new laws and proposals... they feel dystopic and can seemingly only lead to brutal restrictions on the internet. What will we end up with? Only attested modems / endpoints in the home? With DPI? And a government issued smartcard to use it? It comes across as if this is what some legislators are actually after... they must have some technical advisors who can explain to them that the solutions they propose will not work and I am a bit worried they will morph the public discussion into enforcing at a lower level otherwise "the bad guys still circumvent"??
Honestly, I would like my ISP to block all traffic to and from Utah if this law passes. I can't think of anything I want or need that involves that state.
Unfortunately it does not work that way unless perhaps I am misunderstanding your comment. The traffic monitored by the NSA will pass through their collection points in each state and will be silently mirrored to them regardless of the routing of your ISP. Even if your specific ISP does not mirror data the traffic will very likely pass through ISP's that do.
Without it being good or bad (long term, second order effects), I do think all of these (proposed) laws and where we are heading will balkanize the internet. Alternative tech may sound appealing to the tinkerers, and they may keep certain important channels alive (think radio amateurs... they know this game) but for the masses? I already happily block entire countries or regions to my VPS as there is zero benefit for me to not drop them at the FW level.
I haven't had a single person in my life or social media inform me of a single thing I have missed out on since blocking Russia and several other hostile nations with my firewall. I've been doing this for about 15 years. No regrets so far.
I understand your philosophy but it doesn't match my reality.
Warty. I doubt you personally are. But unfortunately your country has engaged in a lot of troublesome activities. We can connect through a 3rd party like we are now that's fine with me. I don't hate all Russians or anything like that.
I see no reason to directly connect to any Russian Internet infrastructure though.
Am I a hostile one for you, being a Russian who has to bypass both domestic blocks of the outbound traffic and (much more rare) "hostile nation" geoip blocks on the other side via VPNs just to read that damn article, mind you, not to hack anyone?
It’s for sure not fair for you personally.
However it’s also not fair the rest of us have do deal with Russia’s hacking and propaganda organizations that are either directly state run or willfully tolerated. IP blocks don’t fix everything, but they do (or did at least) counter a good portion of the bots for no effort.
You live in a country that is awful to itself and everyone around it, but that’s not something we can fix.
I'm confused where all of this censorship is originating from. What wave of efforts is culminating? I can't really explain this from any movement I can see.
There is no evidence it is actually coming from Meta. The Reddit researcher the article cites generated their entire "analysis" in three days using Claude: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47659552
Their website also added this page since I posted that comment: https://web.archive.org/web/20260411112604/https://tboteproj... where they claim their website is under "surveillance" because it got a few thousand requests from Google Cloud et al, most of them to a single page. This shows how low their standards are.
The way that Reddit "researcher" had Claude bang out a GitHub repo in a couple days and single-handedly established the narrative throughout the internet is scary.
When it was released I read a few of the reports in this repo and they didn't even support the claims made. Claude was admitting it couldn't find the evidence.
It's terrifying how easily this misinfo operation established itself as fact on websites where users view themselves as being more informed than average on these topics, like Hacker News.
The users here are probably more misinformed than average on several topics, including this one, due to community flagging and downvoting behavior which has the effect of filtering out reasonable criticism, and restricting discussion to a narrow range of viewpoints.
> There is no evidence it is actually coming from Meta
My personal view that social media should be age gated is caused by Meta. But broadly, polling shows a commanding majority (60+ percent) of Americans believe in restrictions for under 14s.
Is there broad support for digital ID, age verification, etc? Or is it a broad sentiment that kids shouldn’t be on social media. Everyone I know agrees with latter but almost no one supports the former.
The parent commenter is conflating two things. Your right, there can be broad general sentiment that "kids probably shouldn't on social media, or better framed, social media in it's current iteration isn't healthy for people especially kids" but that doesn't imply people are asking for intrusive surveillance or to be monitored at all times when they are online.
> that doesn't imply people are asking for intrusive surveillance or to be monitored at all times when they are online
There is strong demand for regulation and low awareness of the surveillance consequences. We don’t have anyone advocating for a privacy-preserving solution, not effectively at least. Given the demand for something to be done, each jurisdiction is basically taking from the first available option.
Two thirds of Americans believe in "setting limits on how much time minors can spend on social media" [1]. Where we have limited polling, a similar fraction support "banning social media use for all kids under 14" [2].
These are policy polls. The sentiment has moved beyond vague notions that kids should be entrusted to Meta less.
Everyone agrees kids shouldn't be on social media. Some people think this should be done by your phone asking if you're over 18 when you set it up, which is one way to go about it. Some other people hijacked this proposal to make your phone verify if you're over 18 because they want your identification.
There seems to be a growing movement worldwide to restrict social media to under (some teenage range). I understand some of frustration. It comes from the increase in mental health issues with minors… but they are using that as cover to overreach and impose censorship for many. An alternate method is stop social media etc from abusing their users with algorithms favoring “engament”.
It is also convient for people to have a single outside source to blame their and their children's problems on. Rather than admit their poltical and economic policies and cultural expectations might all be a bigger problem.
Ironically I had to go into Google's AI mode and ask it three times not to use any TBOTE Project sources before it would give me the actual original source on this. But the article has a bunch of quotes from big tech lobbyists in support of California's age surveillance bills. Whether or not it was originally their idea is still up in the air, but given that the California, Colorado, and New York bills were largely identical, it's not crazy to say "maybe these were all Big Tech's idea".
I also have this Bloomberg article from 2025 (a year ago) claiming Meta funds the Digital Childhood Alliance[1], which has been pushing for "App Store Accountability Acts" that would mandate app stores do all the age verification (conveniently for Facebook).
Or maybe it was ALEC. :P
[0] It is always ethical to deadname corporations.
I keep reading this but I don't understand how a company might want to push censorship on users. What is the economic benefit of censorship? Does Meta's bottom line increase if there is no illegal content and every user is age verified on the site? Would Meta care if you use a VPN?
The ones that stand to benefit the most are the governments themselves and their surveillance network.
Barriers to entry. If I want to make a small forum, these laws make that potentially much more difficult. Now users who may have used my forum may spend more time on facebook instead.
Multiply that times tens of thousands of new sites not being created, tens of thousands of existing sites no longer existing or being accessible due to new laws, this occurring over multiple surfaces (content moderation, age verification, etc) and the positive impact for meta is meaningful.
This is grasping at straws. Centralised social media platforms have won long ago for completely different reasons (mostly network effects and convenience). They haven't been threatened by independent sites for ages.
Not that many years ago, Facebook tried to broker a deal to provide free internet to India if all of their web traffic and communications would happen within the Facebook ecosystem.
It's long been the dream of more than a few American companies to be the gatekeepers of the web.
IIRC the model was closer to a freemium model where you would get free internet to approved websites (including Facebook) with the ability to access the entire internet for an extra fee.
Facebook and approved sites wouldn’t count towards your mobile bandwidth quota, but the rest of the internet does and requires a data plan.
I've read a take somewhere that seemed to make sense. They don't want to get stuck with the liabilities of the content that gets posted on their platforms. So by forcing the age verification onto the users, forcing users to identify and track themselves, they can have a "clean" route to someone who posts illicit content on their platforms.
It just sucks that that's all in sacrifice of our privacy.
The thing that makes this plausible is that the California and Colorado bills are specifically written to either allow or outright require self-attestation. Children will just lie about their ages because if they don't, the computer is basically useless. So it would give Meta the ability to dodge lawsuits, but still actually have kids on their dangerous platforms, with the argument of "well, the law makes us trust this unreliable indicator".
The tigher, more believable theory is that Meta wants Operating Systems to be responsible for delivering an age or an "over 18 attestation" to apps/websites so it's not Meta's problem.
The idea from the case in the link is that their competitors would be more regulated then them but in general, if regulation is a requirement and they’ve already implemented the regulation then it’s hard for a competitor to emerge.
I keep reading this but I don't understand how a company might want to push censorship on users.
We're being astroturf-ed guy.
The comment you're responding to. The comments responding to you. All shaped by influence campaigns from the beginning.
Meta, X, google, data based big tech, the billionaires, and the government were in on the plan from the start. We were always the ones kept in the dark as to the ultimate intent. Even the anti-censorship and anti-surveillance posts and content that we saw, were being paid for by the same puppet masters. Professional influence campaigns controlled by these same groups shaped the internet discussion of both sides.
And it seems a lot of us still haven't figured that out yet.
We got played. We'll continue to be played if we don't recognize that fact and act to prevent it in the future.
Because I can assure you, censorship and surveillance is not the endgame. And their endgame is very likely not to our benefit.
No. It is zionism, which is orthogonal to semitism, that was chosen as the blame-shifting cover for the message, to put both proponents and opponents of said message on the false trail, but that's not how they should be read.
The Protocols should be read as the message from those who are absolutelty corrupt with absolute power and want to remain in that power forever, regardless of the mask they wear. And they always wear and drop multiple masks, to render all attempts to identify them futile.
It is their actions that identify their presence and persistence better than any labels, and those actions doubled down since 9/11 and quadrupled since 2020.
Orwell used the term "Big Brother", and that should suffice.
Oh, the old venerable discredit by association trick! I'm a bit upset you didn't mention Anunakis and reptiloids.
See, there are no extra-terrestrials, only very sophisticated and evil terrestrial humans of blood and flesh, the new world order has been discussed here on HN daily without almost anyone acknowledging it for what it is, and your DBA tactics are laughable.
I wouldn't say captured. Zuckerberg has been cutting deals with the new administration so often people were seeing him at the Pentagon. It's a partnership
Yep. I brought this up yesterday on the Roblox thread but HN has been ingesting the propaganda for too long to understand their beliefs about Roblox are misled.
Time to adjust your priors y'all. This is a concentrated effort toward surveillance, controlling who we talk to, and what information we're fed.
> What wave of efforts is culminating? I can't really explain this from any movement I can see.
Look at any thread about social media, TikTok, smartphones, or porn sites on Hacker News: They are instantly filled with comments claiming that the internet is to blame for all of society's ills with younger generations. The HN threads fill with comments proposing that we ban children from having smartphones until they're 16 or 18 and similar ideas. Abstract ideas about banning kids from social media or porn sites are weirdly very popular even here, mostly from people who haven't thought about what that would mean for privacy for everyone.
These ideas have become pervasive, even inside tech communities. It was so easy to blame social media and the internet for everything for years, and now lawmakers are riding that wave for political points. It's "think of the children" built on top of the current moral panics.
My guess is bots. Govts and law makers are afraid of the barrage of bots DDOSing them so they are slowly and surely tightening the noose around the internet. I'm all for net neutrality and anonymity on the internet and I don't like the age laws one bit, but I too am afraid of the bots scorching the internet. I still hate these growing dystopian laws but I also want the bots to be driven away from the "human internet" .
Easy: from the fascist psychopaths at the whelm of the world.
People started to understand too much about who's the real enemy, and are not willing to kill and die in meatgrinders of the new world order for the interests of the unelect 0.001%.
Pretend to be anti-censorship. Get voted in. Fast track all of the censorship and surveillance through congress.
When I saw certain billionaires talking up anti-censorship and anti-surveillance a few years ago, I knew we would be screwed. (I knew the same billionaires had large positions in censorship and surveillance tech.) No one ever talks against their own book unless they're planning on screwing you.
> What will we end up with? Only attested modems / endpoints in the home?
you might laugh/cry, but there was a time in germany, when the telephone at home was owned by the state (the "Post") and you were NOT allowed to tinker with it.
personally, i guess, things like sneakernet, lorawan and hamradio will become a lot more popular over time.
And who gets to tell the phone company how to operate?
We try and segment it into governments and corporations. But really there is no real differences between the two. They are all governing policies for groups of people arranged in a sort of heirical pattern. The big top level group, the one that managed to gain control of physical territory is the nation-state or perhaps more accurately the Government(capital G) of which. allocating control to various lesser groups. Including physical sub territories and for profit enterprises (The incorporation).
The point being, even in the most rampant capitalist[1](an economic policy favoring freedom of operation in it's sub groups) nation the for profit enterprises are licensed and regulated and if needed(see world war 2) controlled by the state.
1. As opposed to communism, an economic policy favoring fairness of operation in it's sub groups. Or fascism, an economic policy where no one knows what it is but every one agrees is bad. fascism really is hard to pin down, used as the default bogey man by everybody, but original Italian theory suggests it favors having the most successful sub groups run the state, which would be in the capitalist corner. however the largest wielders of the theory(1930's Germany) used it as a social fairness issue, which is in the communism domain.
That is true. They can be authenticated, though. I don't think it should be read as ham radio specifically, but (illegal, pirate) amateur use of radio more generally.
My pet theory is that network protocols will evolve to require some kind of certificate-based signing to uniquely identify individuals and groups. Hardware and operating systems will have legal mandates to enforce this. Penalties for carrying unsigned traffic will be stiff.
The “upsides” will be plentiful! User verification schemes will be streamlined like never before. If you think there are downsides… well, just think of the kids, damn it!
When discussing Utah, you shouldn't ignore the role that Mormonism's theocratic authoritarian culture and embrace of the MAGA movement has had. Human rights, like right to privacy, will always be trampled by their desire to legislate their morality. The Utah territory was literally founded as a theocracy.
exactly, there's an entire commercial ecosystem for this too, so called 'shameware' (or in their own parlance 'accountability software') apps that exists to put you under religious surveillance (https://archive.ph/RkgYn)
I really hate this tinfoil hat nonsense you see here every day now, Utah is not censoring online content because of tech bros in California lol.
I don't like far fetched conspiracy theories but I really want to know where all this is coming from. Did politicians suddenly all get the same idea or are there groups lobbying for this who benefit in terms of money/power?
The EU has different norms. Bafflingly to me, it feels like the EU had an existing expectation of linking everything you do to your full name and address and then trusting the police to stop you getting swatted. I don't understand this attitude myself but you can see it in impressum laws for example, business registrations, needing your personal info to give feedback to parliaments, it's clearly a pervasive social norm over there. I suppose the reason they don't get swatting is that the police will verify the ID of the person who calls in the report.
I'm sorry to tell this, but everyone will soon realize that the far-fetched conspiracy theories are in fact severly underestimated conspiracy practices.
If they still have any remaining gut to face the reality, that is.
One could infer that they’re trying to make porn illegal in their legislature’s desire to build the United and Puritanical States of America, which itself stems from the hope that increasing the internal sexual pressures in men will reverse the growing trend of intolerance for misogyny among both men and women. That reversal most benefits today’s adherents of misogyny, a population that is strongly represented in Utah, and comes at a cost — viewed as a net transfer of control from women to men — that is societally acceptable for them to make subservient women pay. (If this were various other states like South Carolina or Oregon, I’d point out the usual labor-economics connection to replacing more-illegal race-based slavery with less-illegal gender-based slavery now that the former’s illegal, but Utah’s home to a large religious group that has and remains focused on the gendered form first, so it doesn’t seem applicable here.)
The people making these decisions are religious fanatics. They don’t care.
This is one of the reasons why the purge of the federal government and military has happened. Surveillance state stuff was pretty scary from day 1… doubly so now that the leadership is all toadies who will remain embedded for decades.
I dare you to get half a dozen people with a technical background to call their electeds and explain why these rules are stupid. (And, if they insist on implementing age gates, as seems to be popular, the least worst ways to do it.)
It's not the first time when people who despise liberty of others and want to force them jump through unreasonable hoops shoot themselves in their feet.
Saying "you're unwelcome here" to a large enough number of well-meaning people usually backfires. I hope this will be felt during the next elections in Utah.
>>they must have some technical advisors who can explain to them that the solutions they propose will not work
You are assuming good faith on the part of those legislators.
That is an error.
There is no good faith to be had and they could not care less about physical restrictions, incompatibilities, or impossibilities.
Their goal is to maximize their power and minimize or eliminate people's power, regardless of whether it is legitimate or desired by the people they claim to represent.
You would be more productive summoning the ghost of Richard Feynman to explain quantum physics to a dung beetle than to have a network expert attempt to enlighten those pseudo-legislators.
Also notice that even on here, a site ostensibly for "hackers" and other traditionally civil liberty-minded users, we don't tend to hear about these proposed laws until they're already passed or otherwise too late to stop.
We will end up with what China, Russia and Iran have. The American right has come to grips with the fact that their ideas and beliefs will not will not win on merit alone so they're moving to restrict and eliminate alternatives.
I mean if you're discussing strictly America, you lot haven't had any form of government that's been anything but right wing for at least a few decades (was not born before this lol).
The end goal is a government license to access the internet. But I think it's less regulatory, and more poli-social. There are individuals within the political stratosphere that are adamantly against anonymity on the Internet because they want to be able to attach speech to specific individuals, and punish if necessary for wrong-think.
The country is descending into fascism. If you’ve previous endulged in the politics of “I don’t care about politics”, it’s time to stop and look around you.
Remember the conspiracy theorists talking about this for decades? I do. This is the goal of a bourgeois class of people who want to save their livelihoods and status in the world though don't want any circumstances they can't control - legislators are out of touch with the majority of people as they are funded by any really serve those bourgeois.
The only baffling thing is taht it took this long.
In the physical world, we can limit the types of businesses. We can limit access to them. Casinos, adult entertainment, drinking establishments, etc require efort to go to and there's enforcement (not always effective, obviously) to keep, say, minors out.
The Internet has broken down that structure such that there are no limitations and, like it or not, that's really harmful. Widespread access to sports betting and crypto gambling is just a negative. There is nothing positive about this. Gambling preys on desperate people and gambling addiction quite often leads to suicide.
So I think it was inevitable that lawmakers would get involved. The only question now is what kinds of restrictions we get, how they work and what the enforcement mechanisms are. Some will say "this is a parenting issue". That's shown to be completely insufficient.
My point is that fighting this is (IMHO) a losing battle.
There are a lot of predictable outcomes here. For example, Meta thinks age verification should be enforced at the OS level. Shocker. The company that has no OS thinks OS should be responsible and, more importantly, liable.
IMHO private companies shouldn't be trusted with verifying IDs. The government should do that because, you know, they're the ones who issued the IDs.
I also think the minors simply shouldn't be able to create Apple or Google accounts. Child accounts should belong to an adult account and that adult is responsible for setting the age correctly. The child account should become an adult account when they turn 18.
Attacking VPNs, as Utah is doing here, is... a choice. I don't think that's a winning strategy but we will see.
I also think that location of a user is going to be increasingly enforced and verified. NVidia actually does something like this to try and block their cards being used in China. The cards will ping various locations to try and establish location. I think sites will start doing that too.
Take social media sites like Twitter, for example. There are obviously bots. But there are also people in developing nations who have figured out they can monetize being controversial. I think it would actually be value if we know that Debra the MAGA influencer is actually in Nigeria.
> The Internet has broken down that structure such that there are no limitations and, like it or not, that's really harmful. Widespread access to sports betting and crypto gambling [...]
Your analysis disregards the evidence of several decades in which the Internet existed, but gambling was still broadly illegal and getting around those laws was anything but trivial (since blocking financial flows is, or at least used to be, pretty effective).
Now it's explicitly legal in many states, and I think this can explain for the recent boom much more than the availability of offshore on-chain betting.
> IMHO private companies shouldn't be trusted with verifying IDs. The government should do that because, you know, they're the ones who issued the IDs.
This requires trusting the government in the first place. Easy in some places; not so much in others.
> Your analysis disregards the evidence of several decades in which the Internet existed, but gambling was still broadly illegal and getting around those laws was anything but trivial (since blocking financial flows is, or at least used to be, pretty effective).
I'm not sure what the point of this comment is because it basically translates to "getting around gambling restrictions used to be difficult but it no longer is", which is my point. What does it matter how things used to be if crypto in particular makes financial flows trivial so it's not that way anymore?
> This requires trusting the government in the first place. Easy in some places; not so much in others.
Well, here are you options:
1. No ID verification. A lot of people might consider that ideal but I think it's DOA;
2. A private company, which includes the likes of the Peter Thiel-backed company, verifying IDs; or
3. The government, which, again, is the entity that issues the IDs so, by definition, you're not giving them anything they don't already know.
The government is a strictly better option than a private company because, apparently I need to repeat this, they already have the information because they issued the IDs.
My point is that this recent popularity of gambling is largely a result of the explicit decision by legislators in many US states to legalize online gambling. I don’t think crypto factored in that much.
We will end with correct and desired behaviour. If you misbehave, you get internet ban, and lose your livelihood. Driving licences, passports, electricity, banking... etc already work this way.
Technical details are irrelevant.
You should not be able to criticise current or previous government!
> if a website cannot reliably detect a VPN user's true location and the law requires it to do so for all users in a particular state, then the legal risk could push the site to either ban all known VPN IPs, or to mandate age verification for every visitor globally.
Clearly anyone slightly sophisticated can bypass restrictions like this. A quick search reveals https://github.com/shadowsocks. This only harms regular users who might benefit from privacy. The dystopia levels continue to rise...
There's tension between this law and the 14th, 5th and 1st amendments.
Due process doctrine from the 5th and 14th establish unconstitutional vagueness. A law cannot be so vague as to be impossible to comply with. This law requires websites to enforce a ban based on information they don't have access to. Without explain how they might possibly achieve that aim, it can be considered unconstitutionally vague.
The 1st amendment requires that a law restricting free speech use the least restrictive means possible to achieve it's aim. Due to the vagueness of how to comply on a technical level, the only possible way to comply would be to require global identity verification based on Utah's standards. I don't think that would pass a least restrictive means test.
I'm not convinced. I use a VPN basically always, and frequently get blocked by VPN detectors. It's not perfect - sometimes switching VPN servers/providers gets me past it, but websites can employ VPN-detection technology. Then they just block you, which is what this is all about. Force companies to start blocking VPN traffic. It'll be at the individual site level for a while, then at the ISP level in a few years.
In a single sentence you explained how trivial it is to get around the current technology, then said they can just use the same thing. It’s so simple, just make it perfect and use it?
VPNs are on their way toward being banned and/or heavily regulated. I imagine what will happen is a requirement for VPN providers to "know your customer" just as banks do, and for them to be able to tie a particular traffic stream back to a specific human.
Truly enforcing this kind of ban would require a level of control over the internet much greater than China's. They actually do ban VPN use, yet plenty of Chinese people still use them, and not due to lack of trying on the part of the enforcers. You can basically never plug all the holes without essentially shutting off the whole internet.
China spends roughly $6.6B censoring their internet every year [1]. Much of that probably goes to "guiding" public opinion as opposed to simply removing undesirable content, but factoring in purchasing power parity of labor and parts, let's assume the US would spend roughly the same amount just to enforce a VPN ban mostly effectively. That doesn't sound like a position that will win elections.
They don't need perfect enforcement, or even good enforcement. The purpose is to make VPN use criminal. Then you have a large group of people getting away with criminal activity which you can go after on an individual case-by-case basis, depending on your level of compliance or troublemaking in other areas.
China knows about all VPNs, but doesn't ban them outside of political turmoil. When people start protesting, then they cut off all VPNs. They just don't do it during "peace time" because they don't want VPN users to find out which kinda of VPNs they can't block. They also apply different rules to foreigners and locals, because they want to give a better impression of their country.
China doesn’t actually want to ban VPNs. They want a list of all possible dissidents so they can actively monitor them. “Banning” VPNs just lets them narrow down the list of people who might engage in wrong think.
"IP from a datacenter" doesn't work in practice to detect VPNs.
At work we set up a compliance-related service recently and used the AWS WAF rules to block known datacenter ranges with the goal of blocking bots and VPNs.
We had to disable that rule almost immediately because a large majority of VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) solutions are hosted in or at least egress from big cloud providers.
It wasn't possible to block AWS/GCP IP ranges without also blocking legit usage from real customers.
There are plenty of other ways to virtual data without a VPN, e.g. sockpuppets, ipfs, etc. Since data tends to drift towards being free, it is a game of wack-a-mole.
How many users are going to have the technical acumen & desire to keep playing the game?
At some point the number of people who are going to be able to succeed is so small they might know who you are just by virtue of you continuing to compete.
You'd also need to ban VPNs in other countries, which you cant, so short of stripping all access to the internet outside of America there's not a lot you could realistically do.
Ban them, demand GitHub et al take down the illegal repos, hit up Microsoft for records of everyone who ever downloaded them, hosting providers for customer records, and ISPs for lists of customers with VPN-shaped traffic between themselves and their hosting provider. Or if they’re lazy, just demand that the hosting providers sort it out.
This assumes US citizens using exclusively US based VPNs. You'd have to block all outside internet access as well, or you cannot stop someone in the US using a VPN based in another country (short of IP whackamole).
To an extent, but the US often compels foreign companies to either not deal with US customers or put up with US’s bullshit, so they could potentially get compliance from major overseas providers. More onerous domestic policy could also prevent it, like requiring that domestic network providers block unauthorized encrypted connections to foreign entities. And anyways, making something illegal doesn’t actually require making it physically impossible to do.
The question is not how will they ban it, they just pass a law.
The question is how and when will they enforce it. When they get access to your devices for some other reason, they will see it. It will give them another easy to prosecute law to use against you.
- know ip ranges of popular cloud providers and deny service. Not bulletproof but enough to make it a pain in the ass so people don’t bother
- make it illegal to offer this kind of service for the purpose of evading location detection. Put pressure on Apple and Google, force them to remove vpn apps
You guys need to start reading on Russia's war on internet and treat it as a cautionary tale
I gather that's what all the sneaky bills introduced over the last decade banning encryption were attempting to do. They absolutely want this at the federal level.
What is the motivation for such a measure? In other words, which problem is it trying to solve? And how it is supposed to do so?
I think that we should not carelessly invent laws that just "sound good" to some lawmakers but have no real fact checking done to support them and are not backed by science.
Because, in my opinion, then there is a high risk that these "good intentions" will backfire spectacularly. While not getting even close to achieve the desired effect.
It is frightening to see how the latest anti-VPN developments in Russia [1] are somewhat replicated by some US states. For those not following, VPNs are widespread in Russia after the government started blocking popular messengers such as Telegram and websites such as YouTube, and a few weeks ago Russian government instructed major Russian websites (banks, VK social network, etc.) to stop serving users if the website detects the user uses VPN. I read this Utah news as something very similar: an attempt to reduce VPN usage by forcing the websites to collaborate. Feels very wrong to me.
Me too! Where is the wild-west? The independent sites and dark corners with weird stuff? Those were fun times. It felt like I was an explorer in a new place helping to also build and contribute to that place. Now it's basically like interactive TV or something.
What a coincidence that Utah is following the same pattern as Australia, the European Union, Norway and the UK, while pretending they came up with it independently.
At the same time? I don't think so. Almost everyone talks to each other and takes notes. We know they do. The World Economic Forum is real and has a website you can access. They talk about policies like this under their "Fourth Industrial Revolution" section and don't even hide it. The same policies are repeated across much of the world on everything from smoking to driving to digital ID, regardless of who gets voted in.
Utah is actually trailblazing ahead of the UK here. It was only ministers possibly suggesting VPNs would be next in the firing line and AFAIK nothing has progressed beyond that yet
Yet articles about UK age verification stuff got HUGE amount of attention and backlash here...
There is a clear parallel to the Criminal Justice Bills brought in by Tony Blair supposedly to stop "terrorism" (even though terrorism had been a serious issue in the UK from the late 1960s to the late 1990s, especially in Northern Ireland.)
Now we have Keir Starmer promoting internet ID to stop minors accessing porn on the internet side, and supposedly against illegal migration on the non-internet side.
why are they building data centers in states that are hostile to hosting content there? can't be latency, because california has plenty of data centers and is close by.
This is the stupidest idea I’ve heard recently. Way to go, Utah.
My home router has a built in VPN server. When I’m out running around, my iPhone can route traffic through my house. Pray tell, o sage Utah legislature chucklefucks, how is anyone expected to tell that I’m accessing a website from a hotel in Berlin instead of my house in California? (Which is why we used it last time: I configured my travel router to use that same VPN so we could watch American Netflix at night before bedtime when we just wanted something familiar to relax with.)
Honestly, this is the new “pi equals 3” legislation. “Let’s make laws codifying technical ideas we clearly have no freaking clue about”.
> how is anyone expected to tell that I’m accessing a website from a hotel in Berlin instead of my house in California
Remote attestation in combination with location access as a start. DPI on TCP/UDP timinings/round trip time measurements for distant locations, combined DNS leak detection to catch bad VPNs. Use browser APIs to detect WiFi vs mobile data to let some 2G users through. IPv6 accessibility checks to catch many other VPNs.
There are always technical means, as the more restrictive streaming services like to prove. There are many, many more ways websites can verify that users are not on a VPN that most websites don't bother with, and until they all do and people still use VPNs, legislators will find ways to punish websites.
The real end goal isn't to block content these people dislike within their state, of course. The goal is to go after the existence of adult websites and, in worryingly more common cases, websites discussing basic LGBTQ topics.
No. That’s how someone with pervasive access to Internet infrastructure could tell when I’m on a VPN. It’s impossible for a given website to tell that I’m accessing it over a VPN. Not difficult: impossible. It cannot be done.
This is exactly it. Compliance is a big business. When your company's lawyers tell you you've gotta do something then you do it. Half my team is wasting time on this bullshit and big money is getting paid to those who make the lists.
Technical measures while technically existing failed first in China and then in Russia lately, Russian authorities recently all but admitted that they can not block xray+reality-style VPNs (which were and are developed in China to go over their "great firewall") and now talk about a blanket ban on foreign traffic and basically a whitelist for internet.
The goal is always a perception of control of public narrative. Those people deeply care what "masses" think of them. That they measure mostly by sampling more or less public media (and I actually worked at a company in 2010s which was selling exactly that). And when they don't like what they see, they try to fix that by controlling that media, up to and including banning the whole world.
That is what is happening with all this protecting the children stuff.
Well, yes—parents’ groups are coordinating. Similar to how drunk driving and cigarette rules were passed globally in about a generation. You don’t need reptiles when polling is so strongly against kids on social media.
I'm tired of fighting this stuff. The forces allied against internet freedom are just too large for us regular Hacker News nerds to deal with. What we need is a mass awakening of normal people who see the effects of internet censorship and demand a reversal. And sadly, that might not be possible until the normal people get a taste of censorship to realize they don't like it. So now I think, the sooner we go full China the sooner we can get things back to normal.
> Commercial entities that host "a substantial portion of material harmful to minors" are now prohibited from facilitating or encouraging the use of a VPN to bypass age checks.
People need to do their best to stop paying so much in taxes to their state governments, failing which the governments get increasingly authoritarian. The state governments clearly have run out of real problems to solve, and when they do, they then attack basic freedoms. Keeping them strongly tax-constrained keeps them lean. As it stands, these governments are representing special interests, not the people. It doesn't matter how many places or where this is happening; the logic is the same. What happens is that the tax money is a prerequisite for strong enforcement. Without an excess in tax money, there isn't going to be substantial enforcement. I am not asking anyone to break tax law; only to aggressively hunt for exceptions to your advantage.
Outside of a W-2 salary for which taxes are pre-deducted, there are many ways, more applicable to businesses, also to independent contractors. Even for those with a salary, they ought to do their best to collect all the legally qualified benefits that they can. Lots of independent contractors get paid as W-2 when they could be getting paid as a corp, for which they could write off a portion of the taxes via deductibles and in various other ways. Lots of people could be ordering online at websites that don't deduct a sales tax. Using a Delaware corp for various transactions can also go a long way. Living in a geography where the property taxes are not absurdly high or rising also matters.
Unfortunately it’s been impossible to avoid Red or Blue flavored authoritarianism for the last few decades due to authoritarian control over both the political process and the entrenched bureaucracy.
Yes because the countries with lower taxes are so free and democratic. Pretty sure the relationship is inverse if you take even 5 min of your time to look.
If you've had a successful career already you probably already paid a lot of taxes, unless you're a billionaire in which case you're not paying taxes anyway.
Sure if you wanna put it that way. I don't like paying taxes because our government doesn't use it well. But I also know that if I don't pay taxes I'm gonna have a bad time.
Outside of a W-2 salary, there are ways, more applicable to businesses, also to independent contractors. Even for those with a salary, they ought to do their best to collect all the legally qualified benefits that they can.
Lots of independent contractors get paid as W-2 when they could be getting paid as a corp, for which they could write off a portion of the taxes via deductibles and in various other ways.
Lots of people could be ordering online at websites that don't deduct a sales tax. Instead, they pay a substantial amount in sales tax.
Using a Delaware corp for various transactions can also go a long way.
I don't think anyone voluntarily pays more taxes than they ought to. People DO collect all their legally qualified benefits. It's why software like turbo tax is still around despite being a shitty company.
I disagree completely. There are all manner of loopholes and benefits that people fail to avail. Even the people with only a salary end up paying too much in sales tax and property tax.
I don't know what the deal in developing countries is with this, but it is popping up on multiple continents. The PRC doesn't need it since their internet is so heavily controlled (although I gather workarounds exist), and it does feel like the west is copying the PRC.
I mean, I understand what it effects it has, and why many parties want to perfect their expanding panopticon, and why screaming think of the children makes politicians' brains turn off.
It won't fix children or social media. That's been apparent ever since Facebook defaulted to real names and people still posted everything they would have otherwise. It makes it easier to use social disapproval to destroy nonconforming individuals, I suppose. And to sell ads. And to destroy anyone who criticizes the government. So no real downside if you don't care about that sort of thing.
When I was a kid, I acquired long distance calling cards[0] so that I could dial into faraway BBSes and access a different variety of pictures of nakedness than I had access to locally. This notion that you can bar kids from accessing porn is highly amusing.
[0]Fictional; this is not a confession; I know my rights
There is no need for age verification: ban all mobile devices and access to anything vaguely "social" (and possibly porn) for everyone under 18. Place heavy fines. But it requires more guts than governments have. They get lobbied, coerced by corruptible friends, and threatened, and we end up with the worst of all outcomes: addicted children without attention and lack of privacy.
I am completely baffled by this wave of new laws and proposals... they feel dystopic and can seemingly only lead to brutal restrictions on the internet. What will we end up with? Only attested modems / endpoints in the home? With DPI? And a government issued smartcard to use it? It comes across as if this is what some legislators are actually after... they must have some technical advisors who can explain to them that the solutions they propose will not work and I am a bit worried they will morph the public discussion into enforcing at a lower level otherwise "the bad guys still circumvent"??
Utah hosts I think the biggest nsa data center.
Honestly, I would like my ISP to block all traffic to and from Utah if this law passes. I can't think of anything I want or need that involves that state.
Unfortunately it does not work that way unless perhaps I am misunderstanding your comment. The traffic monitored by the NSA will pass through their collection points in each state and will be silently mirrored to them regardless of the routing of your ISP. Even if your specific ISP does not mirror data the traffic will very likely pass through ISP's that do.
I think you misread me. I just meant, if companies are liable for VPN users in Utah, don't even let me connect to anything in Utah. I'm good.
I realize all my traffic gets siphoned there regardless more than likely anyways.
Without it being good or bad (long term, second order effects), I do think all of these (proposed) laws and where we are heading will balkanize the internet. Alternative tech may sound appealing to the tinkerers, and they may keep certain important channels alive (think radio amateurs... they know this game) but for the masses? I already happily block entire countries or regions to my VPS as there is zero benefit for me to not drop them at the FW level.
I wish there was an easy way to geolocate ip addresses by us state. It's not too hard to block everything from say russia.
Let's all block whole countries just because our propagandists brainwashed us so, yay, what an Internet that'll be!
I haven't had a single person in my life or social media inform me of a single thing I have missed out on since blocking Russia and several other hostile nations with my firewall. I've been doing this for about 15 years. No regrets so far.
I understand your philosophy but it doesn't match my reality.
Warty. I doubt you personally are. But unfortunately your country has engaged in a lot of troublesome activities. We can connect through a 3rd party like we are now that's fine with me. I don't hate all Russians or anything like that.
I see no reason to directly connect to any Russian Internet infrastructure though.
Well, thanks for that at least..
Am I a hostile one for you, being a Russian who has to bypass both domestic blocks of the outbound traffic and (much more rare) "hostile nation" geoip blocks on the other side via VPNs just to read that damn article, mind you, not to hack anyone?
It’s for sure not fair for you personally. However it’s also not fair the rest of us have do deal with Russia’s hacking and propaganda organizations that are either directly state run or willfully tolerated. IP blocks don’t fix everything, but they do (or did at least) counter a good portion of the bots for no effort.
You live in a country that is awful to itself and everyone around it, but that’s not something we can fix.
A sad, utterly sad world to live in. Thanks for understanding the few of us who are not hackers, propagandists, or their victims..
Russia and the US are currently attacking and threatening their neighbors in their respective wars of aggression.
Which countries are you already blocking?
Had to check my settings. Russia, Belarus, Zimbabwe, and Ethiopia. Have any further suggestions?
Skiing
I hope e.g. Colorado has better Internet regulations, so I could do my skiing there instead.
I'm good, plenty of other things to do with my time and money.
I'm confused where all of this censorship is originating from. What wave of efforts is culminating? I can't really explain this from any movement I can see.
It's all coming from Meta: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/reddit-user-uncovers-beh...
Big tech wants regulatory capture.
There is no evidence it is actually coming from Meta. The Reddit researcher the article cites generated their entire "analysis" in three days using Claude: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47659552
Their website also added this page since I posted that comment: https://web.archive.org/web/20260411112604/https://tboteproj... where they claim their website is under "surveillance" because it got a few thousand requests from Google Cloud et al, most of them to a single page. This shows how low their standards are.
The way that Reddit "researcher" had Claude bang out a GitHub repo in a couple days and single-handedly established the narrative throughout the internet is scary.
When it was released I read a few of the reports in this repo and they didn't even support the claims made. Claude was admitting it couldn't find the evidence.
It's terrifying how easily this misinfo operation established itself as fact on websites where users view themselves as being more informed than average on these topics, like Hacker News.
The users here are probably more misinformed than average on several topics, including this one, due to community flagging and downvoting behavior which has the effect of filtering out reasonable criticism, and restricting discussion to a narrow range of viewpoints.
> There is no evidence it is actually coming from Meta
My personal view that social media should be age gated is caused by Meta. But broadly, polling shows a commanding majority (60+ percent) of Americans believe in restrictions for under 14s.
Is there broad support for digital ID, age verification, etc? Or is it a broad sentiment that kids shouldn’t be on social media. Everyone I know agrees with latter but almost no one supports the former.
The parent commenter is conflating two things. Your right, there can be broad general sentiment that "kids probably shouldn't on social media, or better framed, social media in it's current iteration isn't healthy for people especially kids" but that doesn't imply people are asking for intrusive surveillance or to be monitored at all times when they are online.
> that doesn't imply people are asking for intrusive surveillance or to be monitored at all times when they are online
There is strong demand for regulation and low awareness of the surveillance consequences. We don’t have anyone advocating for a privacy-preserving solution, not effectively at least. Given the demand for something to be done, each jurisdiction is basically taking from the first available option.
Yes, i was asking which one the polling they were citing was about.
Two thirds of Americans believe in "setting limits on how much time minors can spend on social media" [1]. Where we have limited polling, a similar fraction support "banning social media use for all kids under 14" [2].
These are policy polls. The sentiment has moved beyond vague notions that kids should be entrusted to Meta less.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/10/31/81-of-us-...
[2] https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/poll-most-mass-voters-su...
Everyone agrees kids shouldn't be on social media. Some people think this should be done by your phone asking if you're over 18 when you set it up, which is one way to go about it. Some other people hijacked this proposal to make your phone verify if you're over 18 because they want your identification.
And then most people just want a ban. So politicians, working as they often do in a technical vacuum, treat it like the other things we age gate.
There seems to be a growing movement worldwide to restrict social media to under (some teenage range). I understand some of frustration. It comes from the increase in mental health issues with minors… but they are using that as cover to overreach and impose censorship for many. An alternate method is stop social media etc from abusing their users with algorithms favoring “engament”.
It is also convient for people to have a single outside source to blame their and their children's problems on. Rather than admit their poltical and economic policies and cultural expectations might all be a bigger problem.
In the interest of removing TBOTE Project from the discussion, I found this press release from the office of Buffy Wicks, saying Google and Facebook[0] support AB 1043: https://wicks.asmdc.org/press-releases/20250909-google-meta-...
Ironically I had to go into Google's AI mode and ask it three times not to use any TBOTE Project sources before it would give me the actual original source on this. But the article has a bunch of quotes from big tech lobbyists in support of California's age surveillance bills. Whether or not it was originally their idea is still up in the air, but given that the California, Colorado, and New York bills were largely identical, it's not crazy to say "maybe these were all Big Tech's idea".
I also have this Bloomberg article from 2025 (a year ago) claiming Meta funds the Digital Childhood Alliance[1], which has been pushing for "App Store Accountability Acts" that would mandate app stores do all the age verification (conveniently for Facebook).
Or maybe it was ALEC. :P
[0] It is always ethical to deadname corporations.
[1] https://archive.is/7vqL6
I keep reading this but I don't understand how a company might want to push censorship on users. What is the economic benefit of censorship? Does Meta's bottom line increase if there is no illegal content and every user is age verified on the site? Would Meta care if you use a VPN?
The ones that stand to benefit the most are the governments themselves and their surveillance network.
Barriers to entry. If I want to make a small forum, these laws make that potentially much more difficult. Now users who may have used my forum may spend more time on facebook instead.
Multiply that times tens of thousands of new sites not being created, tens of thousands of existing sites no longer existing or being accessible due to new laws, this occurring over multiple surfaces (content moderation, age verification, etc) and the positive impact for meta is meaningful.
If there are less sites, meta wins.
This is grasping at straws. Centralised social media platforms have won long ago for completely different reasons (mostly network effects and convenience). They haven't been threatened by independent sites for ages.
Facebook in particular many times voiced its support for various regulations that would be onerous for smaller players.
Does that mean they actually support these regulations or could it mean that they think sounding supportive benefits them?
Even if they really did support a particular regulation, it could be to prevent a version of the same regulation that actually has teeth.
Or it could mean they hope to be consulted on the details of any regulation, which is more likely to happen if they sound constructive.
Corporations constantly navigate the political and regulatory landscape. You can't just take "supportive" statements like these at face value.
And finally there's the general fallacy of thinking that if B happens and A wanted it to happen then A must have caused B.
Not that many years ago, Facebook tried to broker a deal to provide free internet to India if all of their web traffic and communications would happen within the Facebook ecosystem.
It's long been the dream of more than a few American companies to be the gatekeepers of the web.
IIRC the model was closer to a freemium model where you would get free internet to approved websites (including Facebook) with the ability to access the entire internet for an extra fee.
Facebook and approved sites wouldn’t count towards your mobile bandwidth quota, but the rest of the internet does and requires a data plan.
Which raised net neutrality concerns.
I've read a take somewhere that seemed to make sense. They don't want to get stuck with the liabilities of the content that gets posted on their platforms. So by forcing the age verification onto the users, forcing users to identify and track themselves, they can have a "clean" route to someone who posts illicit content on their platforms.
It just sucks that that's all in sacrifice of our privacy.
The thing that makes this plausible is that the California and Colorado bills are specifically written to either allow or outright require self-attestation. Children will just lie about their ages because if they don't, the computer is basically useless. So it would give Meta the ability to dodge lawsuits, but still actually have kids on their dangerous platforms, with the argument of "well, the law makes us trust this unreliable indicator".
Meta’s bottom line is driven entirely by their ability to uniquely and persistently identify users for the sake of advertising.
Anything that makes it harder for a user to escape their dragnet is a win.
Rug pull Ladder pull
It’s just that
“Move fast, break things, regulate impossible to repair.”
The tigher, more believable theory is that Meta wants Operating Systems to be responsible for delivering an age or an "over 18 attestation" to apps/websites so it's not Meta's problem.
The idea from the case in the link is that their competitors would be more regulated then them but in general, if regulation is a requirement and they’ve already implemented the regulation then it’s hard for a competitor to emerge.
They realized all the data on user behaviour is useless after trying to leverage on it with LLMs and now they go after seemingly new riches
Useless data??
There is a massive revenue stream that says this is completely off base.
The data they have is already extremely valuable.
I keep reading this but I don't understand how a company might want to push censorship on users.
We're being astroturf-ed guy.
The comment you're responding to. The comments responding to you. All shaped by influence campaigns from the beginning.
Meta, X, google, data based big tech, the billionaires, and the government were in on the plan from the start. We were always the ones kept in the dark as to the ultimate intent. Even the anti-censorship and anti-surveillance posts and content that we saw, were being paid for by the same puppet masters. Professional influence campaigns controlled by these same groups shaped the internet discussion of both sides.
And it seems a lot of us still haven't figured that out yet.
We got played. We'll continue to be played if we don't recognize that fact and act to prevent it in the future.
Because I can assure you, censorship and surveillance is not the endgame. And their endgame is very likely not to our benefit.
Can you describe in detail the end game and how you came to know it?
The endgame is perfectly described in Orwell's 1984 and certain Protocols.
> Protocols
The antisemitic ones?
No. It is zionism, which is orthogonal to semitism, that was chosen as the blame-shifting cover for the message, to put both proponents and opponents of said message on the false trail, but that's not how they should be read.
The Protocols should be read as the message from those who are absolutelty corrupt with absolute power and want to remain in that power forever, regardless of the mask they wear. And they always wear and drop multiple masks, to render all attempts to identify them futile.
It is their actions that identify their presence and persistence better than any labels, and those actions doubled down since 9/11 and quadrupled since 2020.
Orwell used the term "Big Brother", and that should suffice.
It’s so nice you’re so comfortable outing yourself as a freak who reads and agrees with the Protocols of the Elder Zion.
Any insight on how this is related to the new world order and extra-terrestrials, specifically the Grays?
Oh, the old venerable discredit by association trick! I'm a bit upset you didn't mention Anunakis and reptiloids.
See, there are no extra-terrestrials, only very sophisticated and evil terrestrial humans of blood and flesh, the new world order has been discussed here on HN daily without almost anyone acknowledging it for what it is, and your DBA tactics are laughable.
And Meta is captured by spy agencies. Don't be tricked at any point into thinking this is just a tech thing. And, spy agencies, who captured them?
I wouldn't say captured. Zuckerberg has been cutting deals with the new administration so often people were seeing him at the Pentagon. It's a partnership
It goes way before that, it isn't recent.
In-Q-Tel
It looks like a coordinated effort from multiple defense companies like meta, and I believe openai, and I think palantir.
Yep. I brought this up yesterday on the Roblox thread but HN has been ingesting the propaganda for too long to understand their beliefs about Roblox are misled.
Time to adjust your priors y'all. This is a concentrated effort toward surveillance, controlling who we talk to, and what information we're fed.
> What wave of efforts is culminating? I can't really explain this from any movement I can see.
Look at any thread about social media, TikTok, smartphones, or porn sites on Hacker News: They are instantly filled with comments claiming that the internet is to blame for all of society's ills with younger generations. The HN threads fill with comments proposing that we ban children from having smartphones until they're 16 or 18 and similar ideas. Abstract ideas about banning kids from social media or porn sites are weirdly very popular even here, mostly from people who haven't thought about what that would mean for privacy for everyone.
These ideas have become pervasive, even inside tech communities. It was so easy to blame social media and the internet for everything for years, and now lawmakers are riding that wave for political points. It's "think of the children" built on top of the current moral panics.
> Abstract ideas about banning kids from social media or porn sites are weirdly very popular even here
It's absolutely not weird. HN is the propaganda outlet for the geeks.
Maybe the desire is always there, but somehow the momentum is just in an upswing now?
They finally have the tools to mass read everything aka LLMs. Does that make sense?
My guess is bots. Govts and law makers are afraid of the barrage of bots DDOSing them so they are slowly and surely tightening the noose around the internet. I'm all for net neutrality and anonymity on the internet and I don't like the age laws one bit, but I too am afraid of the bots scorching the internet. I still hate these growing dystopian laws but I also want the bots to be driven away from the "human internet" .
Heritage Foundation, Meta, and generally the Oligarchy
Easy: from the fascist psychopaths at the whelm of the world.
People started to understand too much about who's the real enemy, and are not willing to kill and die in meatgrinders of the new world order for the interests of the unelect 0.001%.
It's the inevitable culmination of their plan.
Pretend to be anti-censorship. Get voted in. Fast track all of the censorship and surveillance through congress.
When I saw certain billionaires talking up anti-censorship and anti-surveillance a few years ago, I knew we would be screwed. (I knew the same billionaires had large positions in censorship and surveillance tech.) No one ever talks against their own book unless they're planning on screwing you.
> What will we end up with? Only attested modems / endpoints in the home?
you might laugh/cry, but there was a time in germany, when the telephone at home was owned by the state (the "Post") and you were NOT allowed to tinker with it.
personally, i guess, things like sneakernet, lorawan and hamradio will become a lot more popular over time.
Same for the US- until the feds broke up Bell between 1974 and 82. but, there were no technical hurdles. Anybody have a toy whistle?
My understanding is that the phone company owned the phone, not the state.
In many countries the state owned the phone company.
If there is only 1 telephone company, either owned by the state, directly or indirectly, or even just a monopoly... what is the difference?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine
And who gets to tell the phone company how to operate?
We try and segment it into governments and corporations. But really there is no real differences between the two. They are all governing policies for groups of people arranged in a sort of heirical pattern. The big top level group, the one that managed to gain control of physical territory is the nation-state or perhaps more accurately the Government(capital G) of which. allocating control to various lesser groups. Including physical sub territories and for profit enterprises (The incorporation).
The point being, even in the most rampant capitalist[1](an economic policy favoring freedom of operation in it's sub groups) nation the for profit enterprises are licensed and regulated and if needed(see world war 2) controlled by the state.
1. As opposed to communism, an economic policy favoring fairness of operation in it's sub groups. Or fascism, an economic policy where no one knows what it is but every one agrees is bad. fascism really is hard to pin down, used as the default bogey man by everybody, but original Italian theory suggests it favors having the most successful sub groups run the state, which would be in the capitalist corner. however the largest wielders of the theory(1930's Germany) used it as a social fairness issue, which is in the communism domain.
Doesn’t ham radio not allow transmissions to be encrypted by law? That rules out most of the internet.
That is true. They can be authenticated, though. I don't think it should be read as ham radio specifically, but (illegal, pirate) amateur use of radio more generally.
Same in NL... we used to rent our telephones from the "PTT".
My pet theory is that network protocols will evolve to require some kind of certificate-based signing to uniquely identify individuals and groups. Hardware and operating systems will have legal mandates to enforce this. Penalties for carrying unsigned traffic will be stiff.
The “upsides” will be plentiful! User verification schemes will be streamlined like never before. If you think there are downsides… well, just think of the kids, damn it!
When discussing Utah, you shouldn't ignore the role that Mormonism's theocratic authoritarian culture and embrace of the MAGA movement has had. Human rights, like right to privacy, will always be trampled by their desire to legislate their morality. The Utah territory was literally founded as a theocracy.
exactly, there's an entire commercial ecosystem for this too, so called 'shameware' (or in their own parlance 'accountability software') apps that exists to put you under religious surveillance (https://archive.ph/RkgYn)
I really hate this tinfoil hat nonsense you see here every day now, Utah is not censoring online content because of tech bros in California lol.
> I am completely baffled by this wave of new laws and proposals... they feel dystopic
Baffled? The whole country's democracy is diving off this cliff, seems to me.
It's not just the US though, EU too.
I don't like far fetched conspiracy theories but I really want to know where all this is coming from. Did politicians suddenly all get the same idea or are there groups lobbying for this who benefit in terms of money/power?
The EU has different norms. Bafflingly to me, it feels like the EU had an existing expectation of linking everything you do to your full name and address and then trusting the police to stop you getting swatted. I don't understand this attitude myself but you can see it in impressum laws for example, business registrations, needing your personal info to give feedback to parliaments, it's clearly a pervasive social norm over there. I suppose the reason they don't get swatting is that the police will verify the ID of the person who calls in the report.
Imagine believing the police shouldn't murder you based on an anonymous report.
It's the whole world.
I'm sorry to tell this, but everyone will soon realize that the far-fetched conspiracy theories are in fact severly underestimated conspiracy practices.
If they still have any remaining gut to face the reality, that is.
One could infer that they’re trying to make porn illegal in their legislature’s desire to build the United and Puritanical States of America, which itself stems from the hope that increasing the internal sexual pressures in men will reverse the growing trend of intolerance for misogyny among both men and women. That reversal most benefits today’s adherents of misogyny, a population that is strongly represented in Utah, and comes at a cost — viewed as a net transfer of control from women to men — that is societally acceptable for them to make subservient women pay. (If this were various other states like South Carolina or Oregon, I’d point out the usual labor-economics connection to replacing more-illegal race-based slavery with less-illegal gender-based slavery now that the former’s illegal, but Utah’s home to a large religious group that has and remains focused on the gendered form first, so it doesn’t seem applicable here.)
The people making these decisions are religious fanatics. They don’t care.
This is one of the reasons why the purge of the federal government and military has happened. Surveillance state stuff was pretty scary from day 1… doubly so now that the leadership is all toadies who will remain embedded for decades.
> they must have some technical advisors
I dare you to get half a dozen people with a technical background to call their electeds and explain why these rules are stupid. (And, if they insist on implementing age gates, as seems to be popular, the least worst ways to do it.)
> they must have some technical advisors who can explain to them that the solutions they propose will not work
I would expect they mostly listen to special interests advocating for those laws. They don’t come from nowhere
when can we hold lawmakers personally responsible for any consequences resulting from passing bad laws?
You can.
It's not the first time when people who despise liberty of others and want to force them jump through unreasonable hoops shoot themselves in their feet.
Saying "you're unwelcome here" to a large enough number of well-meaning people usually backfires. I hope this will be felt during the next elections in Utah.
>>they must have some technical advisors who can explain to them that the solutions they propose will not work
You are assuming good faith on the part of those legislators.
That is an error.
There is no good faith to be had and they could not care less about physical restrictions, incompatibilities, or impossibilities.
Their goal is to maximize their power and minimize or eliminate people's power, regardless of whether it is legitimate or desired by the people they claim to represent.
You would be more productive summoning the ghost of Richard Feynman to explain quantum physics to a dung beetle than to have a network expert attempt to enlighten those pseudo-legislators.
Try 'teaching calculus to a dog', it's easier to visualize.
Also notice that even on here, a site ostensibly for "hackers" and other traditionally civil liberty-minded users, we don't tend to hear about these proposed laws until they're already passed or otherwise too late to stop.
Some might find that a bit odd.
We will end up with what China, Russia and Iran have. The American right has come to grips with the fact that their ideas and beliefs will not will not win on merit alone so they're moving to restrict and eliminate alternatives.
LOL - its just "the right" eh?
I mean if you're discussing strictly America, you lot haven't had any form of government that's been anything but right wing for at least a few decades (was not born before this lol).
Who is supporting this law?
The majority of politicians in general it seems.
The end goal is a government license to access the internet. But I think it's less regulatory, and more poli-social. There are individuals within the political stratosphere that are adamantly against anonymity on the Internet because they want to be able to attach speech to specific individuals, and punish if necessary for wrong-think.
I am completely baffled by this wave of new laws and proposals
Follow the money. Ten to one, it all leads back to Zuckerberg.
Well, people who call a fascism a fascism are always wrong until they suddenly aren't.
The country is descending into fascism. If you’ve previous endulged in the politics of “I don’t care about politics”, it’s time to stop and look around you.
Remember the conspiracy theorists talking about this for decades? I do. This is the goal of a bourgeois class of people who want to save their livelihoods and status in the world though don't want any circumstances they can't control - legislators are out of touch with the majority of people as they are funded by any really serve those bourgeois.
The only baffling thing is taht it took this long.
In the physical world, we can limit the types of businesses. We can limit access to them. Casinos, adult entertainment, drinking establishments, etc require efort to go to and there's enforcement (not always effective, obviously) to keep, say, minors out.
The Internet has broken down that structure such that there are no limitations and, like it or not, that's really harmful. Widespread access to sports betting and crypto gambling is just a negative. There is nothing positive about this. Gambling preys on desperate people and gambling addiction quite often leads to suicide.
So I think it was inevitable that lawmakers would get involved. The only question now is what kinds of restrictions we get, how they work and what the enforcement mechanisms are. Some will say "this is a parenting issue". That's shown to be completely insufficient.
My point is that fighting this is (IMHO) a losing battle.
There are a lot of predictable outcomes here. For example, Meta thinks age verification should be enforced at the OS level. Shocker. The company that has no OS thinks OS should be responsible and, more importantly, liable.
IMHO private companies shouldn't be trusted with verifying IDs. The government should do that because, you know, they're the ones who issued the IDs.
I also think the minors simply shouldn't be able to create Apple or Google accounts. Child accounts should belong to an adult account and that adult is responsible for setting the age correctly. The child account should become an adult account when they turn 18.
Attacking VPNs, as Utah is doing here, is... a choice. I don't think that's a winning strategy but we will see.
I also think that location of a user is going to be increasingly enforced and verified. NVidia actually does something like this to try and block their cards being used in China. The cards will ping various locations to try and establish location. I think sites will start doing that too.
Take social media sites like Twitter, for example. There are obviously bots. But there are also people in developing nations who have figured out they can monetize being controversial. I think it would actually be value if we know that Debra the MAGA influencer is actually in Nigeria.
> The Internet has broken down that structure such that there are no limitations and, like it or not, that's really harmful. Widespread access to sports betting and crypto gambling [...]
Your analysis disregards the evidence of several decades in which the Internet existed, but gambling was still broadly illegal and getting around those laws was anything but trivial (since blocking financial flows is, or at least used to be, pretty effective).
Now it's explicitly legal in many states, and I think this can explain for the recent boom much more than the availability of offshore on-chain betting.
> IMHO private companies shouldn't be trusted with verifying IDs. The government should do that because, you know, they're the ones who issued the IDs.
This requires trusting the government in the first place. Easy in some places; not so much in others.
> Your analysis disregards the evidence of several decades in which the Internet existed, but gambling was still broadly illegal and getting around those laws was anything but trivial (since blocking financial flows is, or at least used to be, pretty effective).
I'm not sure what the point of this comment is because it basically translates to "getting around gambling restrictions used to be difficult but it no longer is", which is my point. What does it matter how things used to be if crypto in particular makes financial flows trivial so it's not that way anymore?
> This requires trusting the government in the first place. Easy in some places; not so much in others.
Well, here are you options:
1. No ID verification. A lot of people might consider that ideal but I think it's DOA;
2. A private company, which includes the likes of the Peter Thiel-backed company, verifying IDs; or
3. The government, which, again, is the entity that issues the IDs so, by definition, you're not giving them anything they don't already know.
The government is a strictly better option than a private company because, apparently I need to repeat this, they already have the information because they issued the IDs.
My point is that this recent popularity of gambling is largely a result of the explicit decision by legislators in many US states to legalize online gambling. I don’t think crypto factored in that much.
We will end with correct and desired behaviour. If you misbehave, you get internet ban, and lose your livelihood. Driving licences, passports, electricity, banking... etc already work this way.
Technical details are irrelevant.
You should not be able to criticise current or previous government!
What previous government? We have always been at war with Eurasia.
Who today even declares wars? We can be best allies, while you blow up our pipelines!
EFF has a similar article: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/utahs-new-law-regulati...
The bottom line:
> if a website cannot reliably detect a VPN user's true location and the law requires it to do so for all users in a particular state, then the legal risk could push the site to either ban all known VPN IPs, or to mandate age verification for every visitor globally.
Clearly anyone slightly sophisticated can bypass restrictions like this. A quick search reveals https://github.com/shadowsocks. This only harms regular users who might benefit from privacy. The dystopia levels continue to rise...
There's tension between this law and the 14th, 5th and 1st amendments.
Due process doctrine from the 5th and 14th establish unconstitutional vagueness. A law cannot be so vague as to be impossible to comply with. This law requires websites to enforce a ban based on information they don't have access to. Without explain how they might possibly achieve that aim, it can be considered unconstitutionally vague.
The 1st amendment requires that a law restricting free speech use the least restrictive means possible to achieve it's aim. Due to the vagueness of how to comply on a technical level, the only possible way to comply would be to require global identity verification based on Utah's standards. I don't think that would pass a least restrictive means test.
I'm not convinced. I use a VPN basically always, and frequently get blocked by VPN detectors. It's not perfect - sometimes switching VPN servers/providers gets me past it, but websites can employ VPN-detection technology. Then they just block you, which is what this is all about. Force companies to start blocking VPN traffic. It'll be at the individual site level for a while, then at the ISP level in a few years.
In a single sentence you explained how trivial it is to get around the current technology, then said they can just use the same thing. It’s so simple, just make it perfect and use it?
VPNs are on their way toward being banned and/or heavily regulated. I imagine what will happen is a requirement for VPN providers to "know your customer" just as banks do, and for them to be able to tie a particular traffic stream back to a specific human.
How will they ban self-hosted VPNs? https://mrbluecoat.blogspot.com/2025/08/self-hosted-vpn-opti...
Easily.
Host them on the cloud providers? You get banned.
Host them in your homelab and the ISP finds out? You get your Internet cut.
How will either of them find out? IP addresses and/or DPI.
All it'll take is an executive order or an act of Congress.
Truly enforcing this kind of ban would require a level of control over the internet much greater than China's. They actually do ban VPN use, yet plenty of Chinese people still use them, and not due to lack of trying on the part of the enforcers. You can basically never plug all the holes without essentially shutting off the whole internet.
China spends roughly $6.6B censoring their internet every year [1]. Much of that probably goes to "guiding" public opinion as opposed to simply removing undesirable content, but factoring in purchasing power parity of labor and parts, let's assume the US would spend roughly the same amount just to enforce a VPN ban mostly effectively. That doesn't sound like a position that will win elections.
[1]: https://jamestown.org/buying-silence-the-price-of-internet-c...
They don't need perfect enforcement, or even good enforcement. The purpose is to make VPN use criminal. Then you have a large group of people getting away with criminal activity which you can go after on an individual case-by-case basis, depending on your level of compliance or troublemaking in other areas.
China knows about all VPNs, but doesn't ban them outside of political turmoil. When people start protesting, then they cut off all VPNs. They just don't do it during "peace time" because they don't want VPN users to find out which kinda of VPNs they can't block. They also apply different rules to foreigners and locals, because they want to give a better impression of their country.
China doesn’t actually want to ban VPNs. They want a list of all possible dissidents so they can actively monitor them. “Banning” VPNs just lets them narrow down the list of people who might engage in wrong think.
"IP from a datacenter" doesn't work in practice to detect VPNs.
At work we set up a compliance-related service recently and used the AWS WAF rules to block known datacenter ranges with the goal of blocking bots and VPNs.
We had to disable that rule almost immediately because a large majority of VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) solutions are hosted in or at least egress from big cloud providers.
It wasn't possible to block AWS/GCP IP ranges without also blocking legit usage from real customers.
There are plenty of other ways to virtual data without a VPN, e.g. sockpuppets, ipfs, etc. Since data tends to drift towards being free, it is a game of wack-a-mole.
How many users are going to have the technical acumen & desire to keep playing the game?
At some point the number of people who are going to be able to succeed is so small they might know who you are just by virtue of you continuing to compete.
All you need is one and a good business model.
Modern adblocking emerged exactly in the same way. The majority of people who use adblock have no idea what current techniques and methods are used.
Ad blocking isn’t illegal (yet).
You'd also need to ban VPNs in other countries, which you cant, so short of stripping all access to the internet outside of America there's not a lot you could realistically do.
Ban them, demand GitHub et al take down the illegal repos, hit up Microsoft for records of everyone who ever downloaded them, hosting providers for customer records, and ISPs for lists of customers with VPN-shaped traffic between themselves and their hosting provider. Or if they’re lazy, just demand that the hosting providers sort it out.
This assumes US citizens using exclusively US based VPNs. You'd have to block all outside internet access as well, or you cannot stop someone in the US using a VPN based in another country (short of IP whackamole).
To an extent, but the US often compels foreign companies to either not deal with US customers or put up with US’s bullshit, so they could potentially get compliance from major overseas providers. More onerous domestic policy could also prevent it, like requiring that domestic network providers block unauthorized encrypted connections to foreign entities. And anyways, making something illegal doesn’t actually require making it physically impossible to do.
What are you talking about what? What illegal repo? SSH? Socks? That doesn’t make any sense dude
Secure encryption has been classified as controlled munitions in the past. Making SSH illegal is well within the range of possible futures.
It'd be a stupid future, but it's a stupid present so I'm not going to rule it out on those grounds.
It doesn’t really make any sense to ban vpns, but that was the premise and not altogether implausible despite being nonsensical.
The question is not how will they ban it, they just pass a law.
The question is how and when will they enforce it. When they get access to your devices for some other reason, they will see it. It will give them another easy to prosecute law to use against you.
Right. The arbitrary nature of enforcement is a feature.
Easy:
- know ip ranges of popular cloud providers and deny service. Not bulletproof but enough to make it a pain in the ass so people don’t bother
- make it illegal to offer this kind of service for the purpose of evading location detection. Put pressure on Apple and Google, force them to remove vpn apps
You guys need to start reading on Russia's war on internet and treat it as a cautionary tale
"Utah to hold Cloud providers liable for failing to police self-hosted VPNs on their infrastructure"
Seems like they will do that too.
how will they ban the icloud proxy? Or is it not really a vpn?
or the firefox vpn?
So they're asking ISPs to build the Great Mormon Firewall, basically. Cool, cool cool, cool, cool.
I'm more scared that there is a push to do this federally, as that will, effectively, be tantamount to establishing explicitly state-controlled media.
I gather that's what all the sneaky bills introduced over the last decade banning encryption were attempting to do. They absolutely want this at the federal level.
What is the motivation for such a measure? In other words, which problem is it trying to solve? And how it is supposed to do so?
I think that we should not carelessly invent laws that just "sound good" to some lawmakers but have no real fact checking done to support them and are not backed by science.
Because, in my opinion, then there is a high risk that these "good intentions" will backfire spectacularly. While not getting even close to achieve the desired effect.
I believe the perceived problem is that people in Utah are watching porn.
It is frightening to see how the latest anti-VPN developments in Russia [1] are somewhat replicated by some US states. For those not following, VPNs are widespread in Russia after the government started blocking popular messengers such as Telegram and websites such as YouTube, and a few weeks ago Russian government instructed major Russian websites (banks, VK social network, etc.) to stop serving users if the website detects the user uses VPN. I read this Utah news as something very similar: an attempt to reduce VPN usage by forcing the websites to collaborate. Feels very wrong to me.
[1]: https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/russias-m...
I really miss the 90s. Can someone make a new internet that’s like that?
Me too! Where is the wild-west? The independent sites and dark corners with weird stuff? Those were fun times. It felt like I was an explorer in a new place helping to also build and contribute to that place. Now it's basically like interactive TV or something.
Are BBS's still a thing?
What a coincidence that Utah is following the same pattern as Australia, the European Union, Norway and the UK, while pretending they came up with it independently.
I wonder who's in common there?
They obviously get the ideas from the same sources. Somewhere they don't invite ordinary people to like Davos or other conferences.
Could just be monkey see monkey do.
You don’t need a formal conspiracy when interests converge.
At the same time? I don't think so. Almost everyone talks to each other and takes notes. We know they do. The World Economic Forum is real and has a website you can access. They talk about policies like this under their "Fourth Industrial Revolution" section and don't even hide it. The same policies are repeated across much of the world on everything from smoking to driving to digital ID, regardless of who gets voted in.
Utah is actually trailblazing ahead of the UK here. It was only ministers possibly suggesting VPNs would be next in the firing line and AFAIK nothing has progressed beyond that yet
Yet articles about UK age verification stuff got HUGE amount of attention and backlash here...
There is a clear parallel to the Criminal Justice Bills brought in by Tony Blair supposedly to stop "terrorism" (even though terrorism had been a serious issue in the UK from the late 1960s to the late 1990s, especially in Northern Ireland.)
Now we have Keir Starmer promoting internet ID to stop minors accessing porn on the internet side, and supposedly against illegal migration on the non-internet side.
Here's the website of Utah's governor if you want to access it via a VPN: https://www.votecox.com/
https://www.votecox.com/fighting-federal-overreach
> Fighting Federal Overreach
"The US govt can't overreach! That's my job!"
No GDPR banner, even if visiting the website from EU
Realistically domestic US politicians have no reason to care about EU regulations
why are they building data centers in states that are hostile to hosting content there? can't be latency, because california has plenty of data centers and is close by.
This is the stupidest idea I’ve heard recently. Way to go, Utah.
My home router has a built in VPN server. When I’m out running around, my iPhone can route traffic through my house. Pray tell, o sage Utah legislature chucklefucks, how is anyone expected to tell that I’m accessing a website from a hotel in Berlin instead of my house in California? (Which is why we used it last time: I configured my travel router to use that same VPN so we could watch American Netflix at night before bedtime when we just wanted something familiar to relax with.)
Honestly, this is the new “pi equals 3” legislation. “Let’s make laws codifying technical ideas we clearly have no freaking clue about”.
Again, way to go, Utah.
> how is anyone expected to tell that I’m accessing a website from a hotel in Berlin instead of my house in California
Remote attestation in combination with location access as a start. DPI on TCP/UDP timinings/round trip time measurements for distant locations, combined DNS leak detection to catch bad VPNs. Use browser APIs to detect WiFi vs mobile data to let some 2G users through. IPv6 accessibility checks to catch many other VPNs.
There are always technical means, as the more restrictive streaming services like to prove. There are many, many more ways websites can verify that users are not on a VPN that most websites don't bother with, and until they all do and people still use VPNs, legislators will find ways to punish websites.
The real end goal isn't to block content these people dislike within their state, of course. The goal is to go after the existence of adult websites and, in worryingly more common cases, websites discussing basic LGBTQ topics.
No. That’s how someone with pervasive access to Internet infrastructure could tell when I’m on a VPN. It’s impossible for a given website to tell that I’m accessing it over a VPN. Not difficult: impossible. It cannot be done.
So the individual website has to subscribe to the surveillance operator's IP location verification service, or be fined.
Basically. Party of small government, my ass.
Edit: actually, not even then. In my home VPN scenario, the IP is a legitimate residential connection.
This is exactly it. Compliance is a big business. When your company's lawyers tell you you've gotta do something then you do it. Half my team is wasting time on this bullshit and big money is getting paid to those who make the lists.
Technical measures while technically existing failed first in China and then in Russia lately, Russian authorities recently all but admitted that they can not block xray+reality-style VPNs (which were and are developed in China to go over their "great firewall") and now talk about a blanket ban on foreign traffic and basically a whitelist for internet.
The goal is always a perception of control of public narrative. Those people deeply care what "masses" think of them. That they measure mostly by sampling more or less public media (and I actually worked at a company in 2010s which was selling exactly that). And when they don't like what they see, they try to fix that by controlling that media, up to and including banning the whole world.
That is what is happening with all this protecting the children stuff.
> It also prohibits covered websites from sharing instructions on how to use a VPN to bypass age checks.
This country is led by idiots that do not enjoy or like freedom.
> This country is led idiots that do not enjoy or like freedom.
This country is populated by idiots that do not enjoy or like freedom. These people didn’t just seize power in a coup.
Maybe a failed coup that ended up not being punished.
Correction — rules for thee, freedom for me.
The people who lead our country love their own freedoms, as long as it allows them to infringe on everyone else's freedoms.
That'll get stuck down federally.
This is happening simultaneously in many Western countries. It is clearly somehow coordinated. You don't need a tinfoil hat to see the conspiracy.
Equally clearly, this is a first step to requiring identity, and ultimately government approval for your activities in the internet.
Somehow, we really must reign in the political class, before we truly land in a dystopia.
This. And the coordinated rollout of digital currencies. It is all a part of the control grid being prepared for us.
One would think this would be obvious to more HN readers, being the supposed technical “systems thinkers” they purport to be.
I guess this is just to accelerate the preparation for a total war.
One can't make all cattle pens fight to total mutual extermination without isolating them first, and blocking all information about the farm owners.
> It is clearly somehow coordinated
Well, yes—parents’ groups are coordinating. Similar to how drunk driving and cigarette rules were passed globally in about a generation. You don’t need reptiles when polling is so strongly against kids on social media.
I'm tired of fighting this stuff. The forces allied against internet freedom are just too large for us regular Hacker News nerds to deal with. What we need is a mass awakening of normal people who see the effects of internet censorship and demand a reversal. And sadly, that might not be possible until the normal people get a taste of censorship to realize they don't like it. So now I think, the sooner we go full China the sooner we can get things back to normal.
Related EFF coverage:
Utah's New Law Targeting VPNs Goes into Effect Next Week
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47969868
Doesn't this seem impossible?
So if I have jo-blow web site.
And a user uses a VPN, how am I supposed to do anything about it. And why should i?
I think you are okay:
> Commercial entities that host "a substantial portion of material harmful to minors" are now prohibited from facilitating or encouraging the use of a VPN to bypass age checks.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/utahs-new-law-regulati...
I have an Amazon affiliate link on my website. Now it’s technically commercial.
I say things in support of my LGBTQ friends and neighbors. Now it’s technically harmful to minors.
This isn’t a slippery slope. It’s already an avalanche.
I don't think that is accurate but you seem to have decided.
Don't host your website in Utah and avoid having a business / tax nexus there.
only the beginning
is this even doable/enforceble?
no, they're inventing make-believe crimes they can accuse anyone they don't like of
Sure, it would force sites to block traffic from vpns.
The fun part is when you post videos of yourself using a vpn to go to gov website or the candidate website and watch them do nothing
That's called complying, not enforcing
Well, how is a law against murder enforced when someone doesn't comply with it?
Not even remotely.
People need to do their best to stop paying so much in taxes to their state governments, failing which the governments get increasingly authoritarian. The state governments clearly have run out of real problems to solve, and when they do, they then attack basic freedoms. Keeping them strongly tax-constrained keeps them lean. As it stands, these governments are representing special interests, not the people. It doesn't matter how many places or where this is happening; the logic is the same. What happens is that the tax money is a prerequisite for strong enforcement. Without an excess in tax money, there isn't going to be substantial enforcement. I am not asking anyone to break tax law; only to aggressively hunt for exceptions to your advantage.
Outside of a W-2 salary for which taxes are pre-deducted, there are many ways, more applicable to businesses, also to independent contractors. Even for those with a salary, they ought to do their best to collect all the legally qualified benefits that they can. Lots of independent contractors get paid as W-2 when they could be getting paid as a corp, for which they could write off a portion of the taxes via deductibles and in various other ways. Lots of people could be ordering online at websites that don't deduct a sales tax. Using a Delaware corp for various transactions can also go a long way. Living in a geography where the property taxes are not absurdly high or rising also matters.
Representing special interests != too much tax money. Orthogonal. It’s a mind boggling leap.
The tax money is a prerequisite for strong enforcement. Without an excess in tax money, there isn't going to be substantial enforcement. Think ahead.
Here's another prerequisite, even farther back than "strong enforcement"--not voting in governments with authoritarian tendencies.
Unfortunately it’s been impossible to avoid Red or Blue flavored authoritarianism for the last few decades due to authoritarian control over both the political process and the entrenched bureaucracy.
Yes because the countries with lower taxes are so free and democratic. Pretty sure the relationship is inverse if you take even 5 min of your time to look.
You're saying that like we have a choice. If we don't pay taxes we get jailed. Simple as that.
Only if you're poor, the rich don't pay taxes just fine.
Incidentally these rules probably don't apply or won't be enforced on the rich because of some loophole.
Stop paying so much is not the same as not paying. Why are you making it otherwise?
Oh OK, thanks for clarifying that I can pay less than I owe and be scot free.
Make less, pay less.
If you’ve had a successful career already, you may be able to “drop out” and find a place to live cheaply. I’ve heard good things about Panama.
If you've had a successful career already you probably already paid a lot of taxes, unless you're a billionaire in which case you're not paying taxes anyway.
The best time to start making a lifestyle change was years ago, but the second best time is today.
If you can legally opt out, there’s no good reason to keep pouring tax dollars into a corrupt, possibly unfixable system.
so it's okay because we're just following orders?
Sure if you wanna put it that way. I don't like paying taxes because our government doesn't use it well. But I also know that if I don't pay taxes I'm gonna have a bad time.
Outside of a W-2 salary, there are ways, more applicable to businesses, also to independent contractors. Even for those with a salary, they ought to do their best to collect all the legally qualified benefits that they can.
Lots of independent contractors get paid as W-2 when they could be getting paid as a corp, for which they could write off a portion of the taxes via deductibles and in various other ways.
Lots of people could be ordering online at websites that don't deduct a sales tax. Instead, they pay a substantial amount in sales tax.
Using a Delaware corp for various transactions can also go a long way.
I don't think anyone voluntarily pays more taxes than they ought to. People DO collect all their legally qualified benefits. It's why software like turbo tax is still around despite being a shitty company.
I disagree completely. There are all manner of loopholes and benefits that people fail to avail. Even the people with only a salary end up paying too much in sales tax and property tax.
This is happening worldwide.
Kudos for highlighting this, because almost everyone here seems to be thinking of their own pot, not the whole kitchen.
It is not happening in destitute countries, is it? If you have normalized and given up already, then your fight is already lost.
I don't know what the deal in developing countries is with this, but it is popping up on multiple continents. The PRC doesn't need it since their internet is so heavily controlled (although I gather workarounds exist), and it does feel like the west is copying the PRC.
How exactly am I supposed to do that?
I understand the need for age verification. And better way to do this is have all device way to communicate the age set by parents to websites.
This is just one of the way. “The Anxious Generation”- Jonathan Haidt put it across. Rey well. It’s import at this day and age to check age online.
Banning VPN is not the way.
Even ChargePoint app does not work with vpn on I am baffled.
I don't understand the need for age verification.
I mean, I understand what it effects it has, and why many parties want to perfect their expanding panopticon, and why screaming think of the children makes politicians' brains turn off.
It won't fix children or social media. That's been apparent ever since Facebook defaulted to real names and people still posted everything they would have otherwise. It makes it easier to use social disapproval to destroy nonconforming individuals, I suppose. And to sell ads. And to destroy anyone who criticizes the government. So no real downside if you don't care about that sort of thing.
When I was a kid, I acquired long distance calling cards[0] so that I could dial into faraway BBSes and access a different variety of pictures of nakedness than I had access to locally. This notion that you can bar kids from accessing porn is highly amusing.
[0]Fictional; this is not a confession; I know my rights
There is no need for age verification: ban all mobile devices and access to anything vaguely "social" (and possibly porn) for everyone under 18. Place heavy fines. But it requires more guts than governments have. They get lobbied, coerced by corruptible friends, and threatened, and we end up with the worst of all outcomes: addicted children without attention and lack of privacy.