Statement: VPN blocking law in Utah? On pause!

The following statement can be attributed to Lia Holland (they/she), Campaigns & Communications Director at Fight for the Future:

Earlier this month when we highlighted Utah’s first in the nation law to restrict VPNs, people really cared what fools Utah politicians are being. It’s very clear that their bad new law can’t and won’t stop Utah folks using VPNs from accessing content online.

We are very pleased to see that on the day it was supposed to roll out, Utah put their VPN restrictions on hold instead. Why? They’re getting sued. Like they should. Because It’s illegal for Utah to get in the way of what people in other states do on the Internet, and the only way that their law can be implemented would do exactly that.

Now, all that has to happen is for a judge to realize that regulating the Internet by make-believe isn’t actually going to work. Utah can’t ban abuse survivors in Colorado from using VPNs to hide their footprint from their abusers, it can’t ban travelers in New York from turning on a VPN to dodge shady exploits and surveillance on iffy wifi, it can’t ban human rights defenders from always keeping their VPN on to make sure that their digital organizing is never linked to their physical location.

Websites can’t know where a person using a VPN is browsing from. With a reputable VPN, that’s impossible. And that’s also the point: VPNs are a privacy protection tool. People use them because scammers and stalkers and worse are gobbling up all our data to use against us. Even the data of kids.

Utah says they’re doing it for the kids. But passing a law that gets you sued and wastes resources isn’t how you protect kids. It’s time for some grown-up logic here.

With this pause and this lawsuit, Utah could re-evaluate and make this right. Their next step should be to meet with the tech justice orgs that have been working on actually protecting everyone online for years and pass legislation that’s grounded in reality and the constitution to protect us all from bad actors online by giving us the tools to defend our privacy, our freedom of speech, and all the rights that big tech companies that love age verification and VPN bans have been stripping away. It doesn’t matter if we’re kids or not kids, we all deserve to be safe from this garbage. And by protecting everyone, you protect kids by default, no matter if they’re on a VPN.