Statement: apparently Utah can’t wait to waste money on lawsuits over its terrible VPN law

In response to parts of Utah’s SB 73 going into effect today, Fight for the Future has issued the following statement. It can be attributed to Lia Holland (they/she), Campaigns and Communications Director:

“Fight for the Future pre-emptively endorses any lawsuit filed to hold Utah politicians accountable for continuing to ignore, in the year 2026, the basics of how the Internet they’re trying to regulate functions.

Utah just became the first state in the US to target VPN usage and they are embarrassing themselves. Simply put, Section 14 of SB 73, meant to block people in Utah from using VPNs to circumvent unpopular and ineffective age verification mandates, has paragraphs that read like AI slop. Such as:

“An individual is considered to be accessing the website from this state if the individual is actually located in the state, regardless of whether the individual is using a virtual private network, proxy server, or other means to disguise or misrepresent the individual’s geographic location to make it appear that the individual is accessing a website from a location outside this state.”

This is the sort of slop that if you asked the chatbot whether or not its previous statement was accurate, it would apologize profusely. Why? Because you cannot require a website doing age verification to determine where someone using a reputable VPN is browsing from—this feat is literally impossible by design for even the best hacker.

Such language and lack of logic begs the question—do Utah lawmakers actually understand what a VPN is? Let’s set the record straight: VPNs are an essential tool for online privacy, security, and liberty that everyone from abuse survivors to small businesses use to keep themselves safe. VPNs do this by totally hiding where a person is browsing the Internet from. Thus, when a person is using a VPN, the website they are browsing definitionally can’t tell whether or not they are in Utah.

Websites are left with three choices: either try to block everyone around the globe who’s using a VPN (which they can’t actually do), or require age verification for everybody in the world no matter if they’re in Utah, or censor all content that meets Utah’s nebulous “harmful to minors” standard for age verification.

Oh wait, there’s a fourth option: sue Utah.

Age verification is wildly controversial for a reason. It makes people vulnerable by forcing them to upload their private documents to leaky websites, it makes people less free by attaching their name to their every move online, and it makes people less safe by forcing them to the fringes of the Internet to preserve their privacy and dignity. Instead of doubling down with more embarrassing laws that are bound to fail, Utah should strike an actual blow at Big Tech and put rights that keep people safe, like privacy, at the center of their legislative agenda.”