this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2025
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This is missing the bigger picture, which is that a ton of companies rely on VPN services to work. So if they block VPN services to the entirety of the public in Michigan, they're basically going to delete their entire IT sector and tech sector overnight.
This is the important take.
The other poster that claims that “this will never pass”, hopefully is thinking of this. Without this consideration - I believe it would. Right wing has been trying any method to impose their sense of morality onto a free society since before I was born. I grew up in a household that actively worked to suppress pornography through local, state, and federal law. I saw this at work.
What would likely happen is VPN providers would be IP banned but people could still setup their own custom VPN solutions as that's hard to ban without banning corporate VPNs? Of course my fear is as this idea spreads VPNs and even Tor will become increasingly useless as all exits will be age gated and censored as well. This is something where technical work arounds will only work in the short term, laws like this are a slippery slope that we seem to be sliding down.
Then what? They are going to ban the use of cloud hosting? The end solution is a national intranet, a great firewall and it would destroy the USA. It's ridiculous to even suggest banning VPNs, but that's the right for you..
I think the real problem here is politicians are some of the most technically illiterate people on the planet. They think they can legislate away problems that they can't...while ignoring the root cause of the issue (I'm mostly referring to the age gating of services, banning porn and VPNs isn't even trying to solve a problem, it's moronic)
Even more, it also bans all tunnelling and proxy technology. SSH, and even TLS would become illegal in Michigan.
That's not how they'd implement it. They'd make it illegal to sell it advertise VPNs to the public. Then they'd impose fines on any American VPN companies that did it, and IP block and foreign VPN providers (their websites and apps) that didn't.
Corporate VPNs wouldn't be targeted. But you're probably not going to watch porn through your work's VPN right?
I can already see cheap vps hosting becoming large with this. Hetzner VPS + Tailscale exit node
https://tailscale.com/kb/1103/exit-nodes
Yeah I've heard it's really annoying to use the web from VPS IPs though because Cloudflare etc. will block you. Dunno how true that is but it sounds plausible.
Yeah, they could just block VPN connections to servers outside the US. OpenVPN's and WireGuard's handshakes are easily identifiable.
Using obfuscation? Kinda sus that your connection with a single foreign server is transmitting gigabytes of traffic, but you do you.
Russia already does this, agent Krasnov and his cronies are just following in their footsteps.
Also the government must be using VPNs