You pretty much just plug the IP into a geolocating API and hope. There's nothing else to do. Any collateral damage is on the legislation, not any individual site or admin.
As you say, IP geolocation is unreliable. Unfortunately that's the only option. If it is technologically impossible to comply with the law, you just gotta do the best you can. If someone in MI gets a weird IP, there's absolutely nothing any third party can do. That's on the ISP for not allocating an appropriate IP or the legislators for being morons.
Remember that massive surveillance capitalism apparatus that has been created for years? Now everyone must pay for it to legally comply with whatever arbitrary bullshit no matter how expensive the data becomes
>Remember that massive surveillance capitalism apparatus that has been created for years? Now everyone must pay for it to legally comply with whatever arbitrary bullshit
Calling geoip databases "surveillance capitalism" seems like a stretch. It might be used by "surveillance capitalism", but you don't really have to surveil people to build a geoip database, only scrape RIR allocation records (all public, btw) and BGP routes, do ping tests, and parse geofeeds provided by providers. None of that is "surveillance capitalism" in any meaningful sense.
If selling the physical location information of users isn't surveillance capatalism, then the term doesn't mean anything. "We don't surveil people, we just try to find out where they live and sell that data"
If that's "surveillance capitalism", what's your opinion on databases that map phone numbers to locations? eg. when you get a phone call from 217-555-1234, and it shows "Springfield, IL"? Is that "surveillance capitalism"? That's basically all geoip databases are. Moreover there's plenty of non "surveillance capitalism" uses for geoip that make it questionable to call it "surveillance capitalism". Determining the region for a site, or automatically selecting the closest store, for instance. Before the advent of anycast CDNs, it was also basically the only way to route your visitors to the closest server.
ISPs have no obligation, although the ubiquity of sites and apps relying on IP geolocation mean that ISPs are incentivized to provide correct info these days.
I run a geolocation service, and over the years we've seen more and more ISPs providing official geofeeds. The majority of medium-large ISPs in the US now provide a geofeed, for example. But there's still an ongoing problem in geofeeds being up-to-date, and users being assigned to a correct 'pool' etc.
Mobile IPs are similar but are still certainly the most difficult (relative lack of geofeeds or other accurate data across providers)
Closely followed by the BETTERID act in response to sites using substandard identity providers, a set of stringent compliance requirements to ensure the compliant collection and storage of verification documentation requiring annual certification by an approved auditing agency who must provide evidence of controls in place to ensure [...]
What would you have preferred? Of course you'd prefer if the law never existed in the first place, but I don't see having a third party auditor verify compliance is any worse than say, letting the government audit it. We don't think it's "regulatory capture" to let private firms audit companies' books, for instance.
More to the point, why would anyone outside of Mississippi need to comply? What legal grounds do they have to dictate what other people do outside of their state?
I worry that as a mastodon server operator I could be found guilty of violating their state law and if one day I decide to visit or transit in the state I could be punished say by arrest.
Same goes for other countries as well. It’s insane.
Any physical business has to deal with 100s of regulations too, it just means the same culture of making it extremely difficult and expensive to do anything at all is now coming to the online world as well, bit by bit.
A blog is speech, but I wouldn't say that deciding to operate a social media site is speech. That said, there are plenty of good reasons to oppose this law.
A social media site is speech (and/or press, but they are grouped together in the first amendment because they are lenses on the same fundamental right not crisply distinguishable ones); now, its well recognized that commercial speech is still subject to some regulations as commerce, but it is not something separate from speech.
I would disagree, for example section 230 reads "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." The content of the site is obviously speech/press, but the decision to operate the site doesn't seem like it is. Very possible I'm mistaken and there is case law to the contrary though, it's a nuanced argument either way
Not sure why you cite Section 230 as if it had anything to say about what is Constitutionally speech; other than inverting the relation between the Constitution and statute law, that is a pretty big misunderstanding of what Section 230 is (and the broader Communication Decency Act in which it was contained was) about.
Right. But if I open a physical business I only need to abide by the laws of that state. This is definitely an order of magnitude more regulation to deal with.
But yeah, this definitely sounds like a business opportunity for services or hosts.
States should come together with their neighboring states to start passing identical model legislation for this sort of stuff, if we don’t have unity across the country. It could be easy and voluntary for the states to do.
The US doesn’t have 50 different cultures with totally different values, but probably has like… 7.
Getting ~340M people to agree on anything is too hard, and now a good chunk of us seem to think the government can’t do anything productive at all. IMO, it would be nice to have an in between layer to do bigger things.
The US would make a lot more sense if it split up between two or three different countries. There's a lot of stuff in US politics which people feel strongest about but are absolutely mutually exclusive.
I think it's going to happen one way or another and the most peaceful way to do it would be sooner rather than later.
Surprising how quickly everyone is expected to comply with these laws - within a week you're supposed to block what could be a portion of your user base?
Most areas of governance usually give years of preparation ahead of anything actually being enforced. This is so short-sighted.
>Surprising how quickly everyone is expected to comply with these laws - within a week you're supposed to block what could be a portion of your user base?
But the law was signed over a year ago[1]? The recent development was that the injunction blocking the bill from being implemented got struck down. I'm not sure what you'd expected here, that the courts delay lifting the injunction because of the sites that didn't bother complying with the law, because they thought they'd prevail in court?
Ah! Thank you. I was wondering why mjg59 needed to geo-block people on his blog. I had no idea dreamwidth was a platform and he was only a user of that platform. I don't think I've ever seen anyone else's content on that site. Now I feel dumb because I've been calling him "dreamwidth" in my head for years.
Clueless human, but what stops a company from ignoring these laws from certain states? How is this enforceable if a company doesn't have any infrastructure within that state?
> Clueless human, but what stops a company from ignoring these laws from certain states?
The threat of lawsuits.
> How is this enforceable if a company doesn't have any infrastructure within that state?
If you are intentionally doing business in a US state, and either you or your assets are within the reach of courts in the US, you can probably be sued under the state's laws, either in the state's courts or in federal courts, and there is a reasonable chance that if the law is valid at all, it will be applied to your provision of your service to people in that state. Likewise, you have a risk from criminal laws of the state if you are personally within reach of any US law enforcement, through intrastate extradition (which, while there is occasional high-profile resistance, is generally Constitutionally mandatory and can be compelled by the federal courts.)
That's why services taking reasonable steps to cut off customers accessing their service from the states whose laws they don't want to deal with is a common response.
"The Zone of Death is the 50-square-mile (130 km2) area in the Idaho section of Yellowstone National Park in which, as a result of the Vicinage Clause in the Constitution of the United States, a person may be able to theoretically avoid conviction for any major crime, up to and including murder"
That's a separate thing -- it's not about being in a different state from where the crime was committed, it's about (supposedly) it being procedurally impossible to give you the jury trial you have to have, because literally no one lives in the relevant district.
No, because no one lives in the relevant combination of state and district, hence why only portion of the District of Wyoming that is actually in the State of Idaho is affected.
Which really just means of anyone tried to exploit the loophole and wasn’t politically untouchable cough, everyone would just ignore the problem and assign them to some nearby district or whatever.
It seems like a problem of states trying to pass laws that control things outside their borders. The jurisdiction of Louisiana courts is Louisiana.
I mean it would be absurd if an anti-death-sentence state started trying to extradite the executioners working in pro-death-sentence states for murder, right?
If the executioner did their work in the anti-death-sentence state it wouldn't seem to be absurd, no. E. g. if they had pulled the cord that activated the electric chair remotely from a pro-death-sentence state (tele-execution ... sounds very BlackMirror).
Not by the same definition, no, its not, though there is a crime called "murder" in all states, and there tends to be significant overlap in the definitions.
Even if there aren't (there are cases where individuals fight extradition to other states though I have no idea if that's ever effective, and questions of conflict between states has come up recently regarding interstate prescribing of abortion medications, etc. with some states explicitly stating that they will not cooperate with Texasistan), a civil judgement against an entity operating in one state could likely be enforced without even interacting with the state where that entity exists - e.g. if they're using a bank with a presence in MS, the state might be able to simply go after their accounts held with the national-scale bank.
Apparently, U.S. statutory and case law establish that a business has an "economic nexus" in a state can be made subject to that state's laws. An economic nexus doesn't require a physical presence, just sufficient economic activity. Sufficient economic activity is usually defined, by each state, according to revenue or volume of transactions. Another test for an economic nexus is something called purposeful availment, which is whether a business is targeting the residents of a jurisdiction. So it seems like, "Are you intentionally selling to Missouri residents?"
To enforce all this, states can sue companies and they can take steps to ensure companies can't do business in their state (so like maybe force ISPs to block Dreamwidth?).
You can't "elevate" state criminal charges to federal charges, though the state can simply seek your extradition (which, if the receiving state resists, the federal courts can enforce, because it is a Constitutional obligation).
(It is possible for state charges existing to make other actions federal crimes, though, e.g., there is a federal crime of interstate travel to avoid prosecution, service of process, or appearance as a witness. But state charges themselves can't get "bumped up" to the federal level.)
You can’t elevate something to federal charges that is not a federal crime, mostly committed across state lines (at least not in a just system); and the interstate commerce clause and possibly the free speech clause would likely be where that gets hung up.
There is a certain group in the USA that is working hard on undermining the rights of the people of America, the enemies, foreign and domestic, per se; and this is part of their plank to control speech through fear and total control and evisceration of anonymity.
I support controlling access to porn for children, especially since I know people who were harmed and groomed by it, but these types of laws are really just the typical liar’s wedge to get the poison pill of tracking and suppression in the door.
I hope some of the court cases can fix some of these treasonous and enemy acts by enemies within, but reality is that likely at the very least some aspects of these control mechanisms will remain intact.
If it really was about preventing harm against children, then they would have prevented children from accessing things, not adults. But that’s how you know it’s a perfidious lie.
This MS situation is just another step towards what they really want, total control over speech, thought, and what you are able to see and read.
This MS situation is just a kind of trial balloon, a probe of the American people and the Constitution and this thing we still call America even though enemies are within our walls dismantling everything.
As you may have read, in MS they are trying to require all social media companies to “…deanonymize and age-verify all users…” …… to protect the children, of course. So you, an adult, have to identify yourself online in the public square that is already censored and controlled and mapped, to the government so it can, e.g., see if you oppose or share information about the genocide it is supporting … to protect Mississippi children, of course.
There used to be the "Oregon sales tax loophole" where residents of neighboring states (Washington, California, Idaho) would make large purchases (car) just over the border in Oregon where there was no sales tax.
That loophole got closed once inter-state data sharing became possible and Oregon merchants were required to start collecting those out-of-state taxes at the point of sale.
> That loophole got closed once inter-state data sharing became possible and Oregon merchants were required to start collecting those out-of-state taxes at the point of sale.
Oregon merchants are not required to collect sales tax for any other jurisdictions outside of Oregon. And they don’t, any non Oregonian can go to any merchant in Oregon right now, and you will be charged the same as any other customer who lives in Oregon.
Also, it was never a loophole to buy things in Oregon to evade sales tax. All states with sales tax require their residents to remit use tax for any items brought into the state to make up the difference for any sales tax that would have been paid had it been purchased in their home state.
Avoiding taxes. It's different. It was always perfectly legal to travel to another state to buy something expensive and bring it back home. No crimes were committed.
It was a loophole that you could buy in Oregon specifically to avoid $1,000s in sales taxes.
> It was always perfectly legal to travel to another state to buy something expensive and bring it back home.
It was legal to do that. If it was purchased out of state with the intent of bringing it back home, then (assuming the home state was California) California use taxes were always owed on it. Other states with sales taxes also tend to have similarly-structured use taxes with rates similar to the sales tax rates.
They were legally avoiding sales taxes, but also illegally evading use taxes, and, moreover, there is very little reason for the former if you aren't also doing the latter, unless you just have some moral objection to your taxes being taken at the point of sale and the paperwork and remittance to the government being done by the retailer instead of being a burden you deal with yourself.
It was the same for WA, so you're right, this was always (illegal) tax evasion, not mere avoidance.
AFAIK it's not that Oregon changed anything, either. It's that Washington passed additional laws that require out-of-state merchants to collect the tax when selling to customers in WA, and said out-of-state merchants complied.
I think the point was that interstate data sharing closed the loophole on evading use-taxes. Now states report to each other about large purchases. It's no longer possible to buy a car or tractor in Oregon and never report the unpaid sales tax back to Washington or California. They will know.
I was addressing the debate that that prompted over whether the situation before that was tax evasion or mere tax avoidance, but yes, the point about interstate data sharing is what that tangent spun off from several posts upthread.
If you do not pay sales tax on items bought in neighboring states, you typically owe your state use tax on those items. Many people simply did not report these purchases however, and this is evasion.
The situation petcat described is tax evasion (illegal, since use tax is due in lieu of paying sales tax at point of purchase, assuming item is brought back to home state).
Tax avoidance is simply minimizing tax liability, completely legal.
You are correct, virtually every state has a law that says “If you buy something in another state and pay less sales tax than we charge, you owe us the sales tax we would’ve charged you.”
It’s called a ‘use tax’. In practice, nobody pays (personal) use tax, myself included.
So, all of those people going to Oregon to shop without sales tax and not paying use tax were technically breaking the law, not using a loophole. I’m not judging them, I don’t pay use tax either :)
Yes to your first question, and no to the second question... the law says it must "primarily function" in that respect.
Putting a small jobs board on instagram would not make instagram "primarily function" as a job application website. LinkedIn is primarily a professional networking website - it qualifies.
Yeah the Wikipedia explanation has faulty grammar. I couldn't figure it out either.
My understanding is that this is similar to the law the UK passed recently except instead of verifying age of users for "adult" content, every platform needs to verify (and log) age of all users for all content?
As an aside, it would be curious if deepening political polarization creates a trend of blocking IPs from specific states or regions for whatever reason... perhaps in such a scenario there would be interesting relations or comparisons between the digital and physical divides...
NAL, but yes, I believe that it would still be a violation of the law. That said, laws aren't applied by robots and it's likely they would be given leniency if they could show they actually tried to respect the law.
If they make an honest attempt to comply and a small number of people using VPNs slip through the cracks, if they're ever reported, they'll likely be given a slap on the wrist at most. If they ignore the law or do some obvious half assed attempt to comply and thousands of Mississippi users are still using their site and they get reported, it's far less likely that a judge will be lenient.
IANAL but i don't think using a vpn matters...Because whether a user is using a vpn or otherwise or not, if the user is identified as from Mississippi, that would be the test for whether these guys would need to block or not. Like, if a user from Mississippi uses a vpn, and these guys don't know that and detect that this user's IP is from, say, Arkansas...how would they be held liable? Unless, i'm missing something, right?
I don’t see how, but the people trying to implement total control of speech, thought, and communication in America are a diabolical and crafty bunch that will likely try putting someone through the wringer for that one day.
The end game here is total control and awareness of who is saying what at any time, in order to allow those messages to be thwarted.
Might it be sufficient to dynamically block anyone that has a registered home address in Mississippi for their payment method? Most ISP's span multiple states.
Google have additional information about IP addresses that updates dynamically based on cell phone, wifi and other magic usage so maybe ask them if they have some javascript that queries their site for more specific city/state details. Also call Pornhub and ask how they were blocking specific states to meet legal requirements.
For the Bluesky ban, I'm not in Mississippi, but whatever IP Geolocation service they're use thinks I my home internet is in Mississippi. It's doubtless that lots of people inside Mississippi but near borders aren't being blocked, because that's just not a thing that's really possible.
If I were in Dreamwidth's shoes, I'd be very much concerned with minimizing legal exposure, not number of users excluded. At 10k/user*day, it's a reasonable choice to block as broadly as makes sense.
Tough for the neighbors, but nitpicking "resident" is not a good choice here.
IANAL, but there’s a question of reasonable burden. Not sure if that applies here, but it’s not unreasonable to say you simply don’t want to do business in a state where the regulations are cost prohibitive. Given they make a reasonable effort to not provide a service to MI, it’s not really on them to police people trying to circumvent a state’s local laws.
Pornhub and BlueSky have done similar in response to this legislation in Texas. Wikipedia and a few other sites blocked the UK to avoid being burdened by their Safety act. Pretty much every streaming platform implements regional geo blocking for licensing reasons.
I’ll be curious to see how things shake out in the long run given the current political climate.
For the record, Wikipedia has not (yet) blocked the UK. They are awaiting official classification by Ofcom of the Wikipedia website. However, the uncertainty is definitely vexing, and the direction this is going is truly worrying.
IANAL, but if the actual legislation did not either recommend or dictate which method would be either good or even considered valid for purposes of enactment of the law, would it then be subject to interpretation?
Also, for the enforcement agency who is/will be tasked with checking things out here...do they know whether geo-blocking is valid method or not? Its a silly law, don't get me wrong...but if its enforcement validation mechanisms are not up to snuff, i wonder how things will play out - both here in dreamwidth's case and other folks in a similar boat?
Is it insufficient? The law says they need to take commercially reasonable efforts to verify people's age in Mississippi. Geoblocking is a pretty commercially reasonable effort to identify who lives in Mississippi, and they don't provide service to those people.
> How is this vaguely sufficient to meet the legal requirements of the law?
It may not be, if the law can be applied to them.
OTOH, may be sufficient to make it illegal to apply the law to them in the first place. US states do not have unlimited jurisdiction to regulate conduct occurring outside of their borders, but they do have more ability to regulate conduct of entities intentionally doing business within their borders.
I wonder if these state laws are at some point going to collide with Apple’s Private Relay service. It’s included with an iCloud subscription, and very easy to turn on, so I imagine Apple has way, way more users than a typical VPN provider. And they make no effort to ensure your exit node is in the same state as you are. A most it will keep the same “general location,” and there’s an option to let it use anything in the same country and time zone.
Since some idiotic courts have ruled a website’s Terms of Service to be legally binding, why can’t I just say no one from Mississippi is allowed to access my site and be done with it?
I’m not being glib. Honestly, why can’t I? There’s precedent for saying that’s unauthorized access, so the feds (not the state; “Interstate Commerce Clause” and all that) should prosecute the visitor for violating my ToS.
For the same reason a bars don't just ask people to sign a document saying they're 21 in lieu of an ID.
The laws are written in a way where the responsibility for enforcement falls on the operator of the business. In both cases, the business doesn't actually have to verify anything if they don't want to, but if it's found that they're allowing violations to happen, they will be held legally responsible.
> Since some idiotic courts have ruled a website’s Terms of Service to be legally binding, why can’t I just say no one from Mississippi is allowed to access my site and be done with it?
That would allow you, perhaps, to sue people from MS that used your site for violating the ToS (though, "some idiotic courts have ruled" does not mean "the courts which actually create binding precedent over those that would adjudicate your case have ruled...", so, be careful even there.) But that doesn't actually mean that, if someone from MS used your site and you took no further steps to prevent it you would not be liable to the extent that you did not comply with the age verification law.
> There’s precedent for saying that’s unauthorized access, so the feds (not the state; “Interstate Commerce Clause” and all that) should prosecute the visitor for violating my ToS.
Most things in interstate commerce, except where the feds have specifically excluded the states, are both federal and state jurisdiction, but neither the feds nor the state are obligated, even if applicable law exists which allows them to, to prosecute anyone for violating your ToS. You can (civilly) attempt to do so if you are bothered by it.
>Unfortunately, the penalties for failing to comply with the Mississippi law are incredibly steep: fines of $10,000 per user from Mississippi who we don't have identity documents verifying age for, per incident -- which means every time someone from Mississippi loaded Dreamwidth, we'd potentially owe Mississippi $10,000. Even a single $10,000 fine would be rough for us, but the per-user, per-incident nature of the actual fine structure is an existential threat.
Reminds me of Silicon Valley. PiperChat has grossly violated COPPA as there was no parental consent form on the app leading to a 21 billion dollar fine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3zU7sV4bJE
I see the larger objective as total control over all speech, thought, and information in more circuitous and pernicious ways than something in one of the poster-boys of “tyranny”.
This is just the start and the trial balloons. The enemy within is a bit nervous about this attack on the most fundamental freedom that the Constitution is protecting, free speech, but they’re also very confident in themselves.
Sometimes, often even, Dreamwidth can do the right thing like this. I fully support them in this fight and hope they win. But let's not pretend banning huge IP ranges for years at a time is new to them.
Dreamwidth has been at the forefront of banning large swaths of the internet. They started doing it years before anyone else. Before the for-profit corporate spidering of HTTP/S content even began causing issues. This is well trod territory and entirely familiar for them and their upstream network provider they like to blame their inability to fix it on.
it is just a new better Internet era - everybody to use VPN. Thanks to the conservatives for facilitating such a progress.
For example, these days in Russia awareness and usage of VPN is well beyond any normal country. With Facebook and IG for example blocked for Meta being officially branded an "extremist organization" (by the way Taliban was taken off that list recently, so what do you guys in Menlo Park are cooking what is worse than Taliban? May be some freedom of speech? :) people in Russia of all strata is still using it, now through VPN, many from mobile devices. The thing of note from USSR/Russia here is that habitual violation of unreasonable laws breeds wide disrespect for the system of law as a whole, and it i very hard to reverse the flow.
>True, but the next thing, will VPNs be forced to age verify eventually ?
it is like age verifying current generic access to the Internet. Sure, we'll come to this too (the anti-utopias aren't fiction, it is future :), yet we still don't verify such a generic access because it isn't the time yet, the society isn't yet totalitarian enough.
As a preview - in Russia (i'm less familiar with China to comment on it) they do already attack VPN by making it illegal to advertise it, something like this.
Russia is doing quite sophisticated technological enforcement, as well - even if you're running your own VPN server, you need something like V2Ray or Trojan to get through.
Is there even such a thing as a "Mississippi IP?"
I.E. Are US ISPs, particularly big ones like Comcast, required to geolocate ISPs to the state where the person is actually in? What about mobile ones?
Where I live (not US), it is extremely common to get an IP that Maxmind geolocates to a region far from where you actually live.
You pretty much just plug the IP into a geolocating API and hope. There's nothing else to do. Any collateral damage is on the legislation, not any individual site or admin.
As you say, IP geolocation is unreliable. Unfortunately that's the only option. If it is technologically impossible to comply with the law, you just gotta do the best you can. If someone in MI gets a weird IP, there's absolutely nothing any third party can do. That's on the ISP for not allocating an appropriate IP or the legislators for being morons.
MI is Michigan.
Right, they might get an MS IP and be blocked :P
GeoIP services are not 100% accurate, but that doesn't mean they're completely useless.
The law in question requires "commercially reasonable efforts"
Remember that massive surveillance capitalism apparatus that has been created for years? Now everyone must pay for it to legally comply with whatever arbitrary bullshit no matter how expensive the data becomes
The most popular GeoIP database has a free tier that would easily work for this. And there are many other options.
>Remember that massive surveillance capitalism apparatus that has been created for years? Now everyone must pay for it to legally comply with whatever arbitrary bullshit
Calling geoip databases "surveillance capitalism" seems like a stretch. It might be used by "surveillance capitalism", but you don't really have to surveil people to build a geoip database, only scrape RIR allocation records (all public, btw) and BGP routes, do ping tests, and parse geofeeds provided by providers. None of that is "surveillance capitalism" in any meaningful sense.
If selling the physical location information of users isn't surveillance capatalism, then the term doesn't mean anything. "We don't surveil people, we just try to find out where they live and sell that data"
If that's "surveillance capitalism", what's your opinion on databases that map phone numbers to locations? eg. when you get a phone call from 217-555-1234, and it shows "Springfield, IL"? Is that "surveillance capitalism"? That's basically all geoip databases are. Moreover there's plenty of non "surveillance capitalism" uses for geoip that make it questionable to call it "surveillance capitalism". Determining the region for a site, or automatically selecting the closest store, for instance. Before the advent of anycast CDNs, it was also basically the only way to route your visitors to the closest server.
I live in Vancouver, WA and my IP comes back to Portland, OR.
ISPs have no obligation, although the ubiquity of sites and apps relying on IP geolocation mean that ISPs are incentivized to provide correct info these days.
I run a geolocation service, and over the years we've seen more and more ISPs providing official geofeeds. The majority of medium-large ISPs in the US now provide a geofeed, for example. But there's still an ongoing problem in geofeeds being up-to-date, and users being assigned to a correct 'pool' etc.
Mobile IPs are similar but are still certainly the most difficult (relative lack of geofeeds or other accurate data across providers)
Between this and the UK Online Safety Bill, how are people meant to keep track?
Launch a small website and commit a felony in 7 states and 13 countries.
I wouldn't have known about the Mississippi bill unless I'd read this. How are we have to know?
Probably an area for Cloudflare to offer it as a service. Content type X, blocked in [locales]. Advertised as a liability mitigation.
Closely followed by the BETTERID act in response to sites using substandard identity providers, a set of stringent compliance requirements to ensure the compliant collection and storage of verification documentation requiring annual certification by an approved auditing agency who must provide evidence of controls in place to ensure [...]
Regulatory capture in real time!
>Regulatory capture in real time!
What would you have preferred? Of course you'd prefer if the law never existed in the first place, but I don't see having a third party auditor verify compliance is any worse than say, letting the government audit it. We don't think it's "regulatory capture" to let private firms audit companies' books, for instance.
More to the point, why would anyone outside of Mississippi need to comply? What legal grounds do they have to dictate what other people do outside of their state?
I worry that as a mastodon server operator I could be found guilty of violating their state law and if one day I decide to visit or transit in the state I could be punished say by arrest.
Same goes for other countries as well. It’s insane.
Any physical business has to deal with 100s of regulations too, it just means the same culture of making it extremely difficult and expensive to do anything at all is now coming to the online world as well, bit by bit.
Websites aren't necessarily businesses; they're speech.
A blog is speech, but I wouldn't say that deciding to operate a social media site is speech. That said, there are plenty of good reasons to oppose this law.
A social media site is speech (and/or press, but they are grouped together in the first amendment because they are lenses on the same fundamental right not crisply distinguishable ones); now, its well recognized that commercial speech is still subject to some regulations as commerce, but it is not something separate from speech.
I would disagree, for example section 230 reads "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." The content of the site is obviously speech/press, but the decision to operate the site doesn't seem like it is. Very possible I'm mistaken and there is case law to the contrary though, it's a nuanced argument either way
Not sure why you cite Section 230 as if it had anything to say about what is Constitutionally speech; other than inverting the relation between the Constitution and statute law, that is a pretty big misunderstanding of what Section 230 is (and the broader Communication Decency Act in which it was contained was) about.
> Any physical business
Websites don't have to be a business or be related to one.
Right. But if I open a physical business I only need to abide by the laws of that state. This is definitely an order of magnitude more regulation to deal with.
But yeah, this definitely sounds like a business opportunity for services or hosts.
Check your local laws and make sure never to travel outside your current state.
States should come together with their neighboring states to start passing identical model legislation for this sort of stuff, if we don’t have unity across the country. It could be easy and voluntary for the states to do.
The US doesn’t have 50 different cultures with totally different values, but probably has like… 7.
This sounds great, until those states hate each other and want to get one over on the other one, even if they're ideologically aligned.
Source: am from Kansas City.
This is true.
Source: am from St. Louis.
> States should come together with their neighboring states to start passing identical model legislation for this sort of stuff...
Yes! Make a union of states! How should we call that? States Union... Union of States... United States! Yeah, that should work.
Getting ~340M people to agree on anything is too hard, and now a good chunk of us seem to think the government can’t do anything productive at all. IMO, it would be nice to have an in between layer to do bigger things.
The US would make a lot more sense if it split up between two or three different countries. There's a lot of stuff in US politics which people feel strongest about but are absolutely mutually exclusive.
I think it's going to happen one way or another and the most peaceful way to do it would be sooner rather than later.
Surprising how quickly everyone is expected to comply with these laws - within a week you're supposed to block what could be a portion of your user base?
Most areas of governance usually give years of preparation ahead of anything actually being enforced. This is so short-sighted.
> This is so short-sighted.
Might as well be the slogan of the current era
>Surprising how quickly everyone is expected to comply with these laws - within a week you're supposed to block what could be a portion of your user base?
But the law was signed over a year ago[1]? The recent development was that the injunction blocking the bill from being implemented got struck down. I'm not sure what you'd expected here, that the courts delay lifting the injunction because of the sites that didn't bother complying with the law, because they thought they'd prevail in court?
[1] https://legiscan.com/MS/bill/HB1126/2024
I don’t think it’s short sighted. They just don’t care.
Related thread,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44990886 ("Bluesky Goes Dark in Mississippi over Age Verification Law (wired.com)"—175 comments)
In case anyone is wondering what I was wondering:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamwidth
Ah! Thank you. I was wondering why mjg59 needed to geo-block people on his blog. I had no idea dreamwidth was a platform and he was only a user of that platform. I don't think I've ever seen anyone else's content on that site. Now I feel dumb because I've been calling him "dreamwidth" in my head for years.
And the law in question:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Walker_Montgomery_Protecti...
Thanks, I could not get by their really bad captha
Clueless human, but what stops a company from ignoring these laws from certain states? How is this enforceable if a company doesn't have any infrastructure within that state?
> Clueless human, but what stops a company from ignoring these laws from certain states?
The threat of lawsuits.
> How is this enforceable if a company doesn't have any infrastructure within that state?
If you are intentionally doing business in a US state, and either you or your assets are within the reach of courts in the US, you can probably be sued under the state's laws, either in the state's courts or in federal courts, and there is a reasonable chance that if the law is valid at all, it will be applied to your provision of your service to people in that state. Likewise, you have a risk from criminal laws of the state if you are personally within reach of any US law enforcement, through intrastate extradition (which, while there is occasional high-profile resistance, is generally Constitutionally mandatory and can be compelled by the federal courts.)
That's why services taking reasonable steps to cut off customers accessing their service from the states whose laws they don't want to deal with is a common response.
Now I am curious as well. Are there…extradition treaties between states?
The treaty in question is the Constitution. All states must grant extradition to any other state.
It would be pretty crazy if you could kill someone in Arizona and then just walk over the border to California and not be able to be prosecuted…
You mean the Zone Of Death?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_of_Death_(Yellowstone)
"The Zone of Death is the 50-square-mile (130 km2) area in the Idaho section of Yellowstone National Park in which, as a result of the Vicinage Clause in the Constitution of the United States, a person may be able to theoretically avoid conviction for any major crime, up to and including murder"
That's a separate thing -- it's not about being in a different state from where the crime was committed, it's about (supposedly) it being procedurally impossible to give you the jury trial you have to have, because literally no one lives in the relevant district.
No, because no one lives in the relevant combination of state and district, hence why only portion of the District of Wyoming that is actually in the State of Idaho is affected.
Which really just means of anyone tried to exploit the loophole and wasn’t politically untouchable cough, everyone would just ignore the problem and assign them to some nearby district or whatever.
Seems like the solution is to bus in new residents if such a trial was needed.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ny-gov-hochul-rejects-l...
>New York governor rejects Louisiana's extradition request for doctor in abortion pill case
cough
Exactly. We don't have a problem with too few laws and regulations. We have a problem with enforcement and accountability.
It seems like a problem of states trying to pass laws that control things outside their borders. The jurisdiction of Louisiana courts is Louisiana.
I mean it would be absurd if an anti-death-sentence state started trying to extradite the executioners working in pro-death-sentence states for murder, right?
If the executioner did their work in the anti-death-sentence state it wouldn't seem to be absurd, no. E. g. if they had pulled the cord that activated the electric chair remotely from a pro-death-sentence state (tele-execution ... sounds very BlackMirror).
I’d expect that to result in a very confusing court case. Fortunately, despite all the other messes going on, we haven’t tried anything that silly.
Murder is a crime in all states. If the two states disagree on if a crime occurred, does the requesting state get to impose its laws on everyone?
> Murder is a crime in all states.
Not by the same definition, no, its not, though there is a crime called "murder" in all states, and there tends to be significant overlap in the definitions.
So Murder is a crime in all states.
Yeah, that would be crazy, but the point here is that the "crime" is not being committed in Mississippi at all.
Even if there aren't (there are cases where individuals fight extradition to other states though I have no idea if that's ever effective, and questions of conflict between states has come up recently regarding interstate prescribing of abortion medications, etc. with some states explicitly stating that they will not cooperate with Texasistan), a civil judgement against an entity operating in one state could likely be enforced without even interacting with the state where that entity exists - e.g. if they're using a bank with a presence in MS, the state might be able to simply go after their accounts held with the national-scale bank.
There are certainly extraditions between states, so whether there's a treaty is rather academic
Apparently, U.S. statutory and case law establish that a business has an "economic nexus" in a state can be made subject to that state's laws. An economic nexus doesn't require a physical presence, just sufficient economic activity. Sufficient economic activity is usually defined, by each state, according to revenue or volume of transactions. Another test for an economic nexus is something called purposeful availment, which is whether a business is targeting the residents of a jurisdiction. So it seems like, "Are you intentionally selling to Missouri residents?"
To enforce all this, states can sue companies and they can take steps to ensure companies can't do business in their state (so like maybe force ISPs to block Dreamwidth?).
If they're able to elevate some of your charges to the federal level you're fucked. IANAL though so I don't know if/how that would happen.
You can't "elevate" state criminal charges to federal charges, though the state can simply seek your extradition (which, if the receiving state resists, the federal courts can enforce, because it is a Constitutional obligation).
(It is possible for state charges existing to make other actions federal crimes, though, e.g., there is a federal crime of interstate travel to avoid prosecution, service of process, or appearance as a witness. But state charges themselves can't get "bumped up" to the federal level.)
You can’t elevate something to federal charges that is not a federal crime, mostly committed across state lines (at least not in a just system); and the interstate commerce clause and possibly the free speech clause would likely be where that gets hung up.
There is a certain group in the USA that is working hard on undermining the rights of the people of America, the enemies, foreign and domestic, per se; and this is part of their plank to control speech through fear and total control and evisceration of anonymity.
I support controlling access to porn for children, especially since I know people who were harmed and groomed by it, but these types of laws are really just the typical liar’s wedge to get the poison pill of tracking and suppression in the door.
I hope some of the court cases can fix some of these treasonous and enemy acts by enemies within, but reality is that likely at the very least some aspects of these control mechanisms will remain intact.
If it really was about preventing harm against children, then they would have prevented children from accessing things, not adults. But that’s how you know it’s a perfidious lie.
This MS situation is just another step towards what they really want, total control over speech, thought, and what you are able to see and read.
This MS situation is just a kind of trial balloon, a probe of the American people and the Constitution and this thing we still call America even though enemies are within our walls dismantling everything.
As you may have read, in MS they are trying to require all social media companies to “…deanonymize and age-verify all users…” …… to protect the children, of course. So you, an adult, have to identify yourself online in the public square that is already censored and controlled and mapped, to the government so it can, e.g., see if you oppose or share information about the genocide it is supporting … to protect Mississippi children, of course.
> How is this enforceable if a company doesn't have any infrastructure within that state?
It's a good question. Maybe something with interstate commerce laws?
There used to be the "Oregon sales tax loophole" where residents of neighboring states (Washington, California, Idaho) would make large purchases (car) just over the border in Oregon where there was no sales tax.
That loophole got closed once inter-state data sharing became possible and Oregon merchants were required to start collecting those out-of-state taxes at the point of sale.
> That loophole got closed once inter-state data sharing became possible and Oregon merchants were required to start collecting those out-of-state taxes at the point of sale.
Oregon merchants are not required to collect sales tax for any other jurisdictions outside of Oregon. And they don’t, any non Oregonian can go to any merchant in Oregon right now, and you will be charged the same as any other customer who lives in Oregon.
Also, it was never a loophole to buy things in Oregon to evade sales tax. All states with sales tax require their residents to remit use tax for any items brought into the state to make up the difference for any sales tax that would have been paid had it been purchased in their home state.
That wasn't a loophole. It was just a bunch of people evading taxes.
> people evading taxes
Avoiding taxes. It's different. It was always perfectly legal to travel to another state to buy something expensive and bring it back home. No crimes were committed.
It was a loophole that you could buy in Oregon specifically to avoid $1,000s in sales taxes.
> It was always perfectly legal to travel to another state to buy something expensive and bring it back home.
It was legal to do that. If it was purchased out of state with the intent of bringing it back home, then (assuming the home state was California) California use taxes were always owed on it. Other states with sales taxes also tend to have similarly-structured use taxes with rates similar to the sales tax rates.
They were legally avoiding sales taxes, but also illegally evading use taxes, and, moreover, there is very little reason for the former if you aren't also doing the latter, unless you just have some moral objection to your taxes being taken at the point of sale and the paperwork and remittance to the government being done by the retailer instead of being a burden you deal with yourself.
It was the same for WA, so you're right, this was always (illegal) tax evasion, not mere avoidance.
AFAIK it's not that Oregon changed anything, either. It's that Washington passed additional laws that require out-of-state merchants to collect the tax when selling to customers in WA, and said out-of-state merchants complied.
I think the point was that interstate data sharing closed the loophole on evading use-taxes. Now states report to each other about large purchases. It's no longer possible to buy a car or tractor in Oregon and never report the unpaid sales tax back to Washington or California. They will know.
I was addressing the debate that that prompted over whether the situation before that was tax evasion or mere tax avoidance, but yes, the point about interstate data sharing is what that tangent spun off from several posts upthread.
If you do not pay sales tax on items bought in neighboring states, you typically owe your state use tax on those items. Many people simply did not report these purchases however, and this is evasion.
chrismcb is correct.
The situation petcat described is tax evasion (illegal, since use tax is due in lieu of paying sales tax at point of purchase, assuming item is brought back to home state).
Tax avoidance is simply minimizing tax liability, completely legal.
You are correct, virtually every state has a law that says “If you buy something in another state and pay less sales tax than we charge, you owe us the sales tax we would’ve charged you.”
It’s called a ‘use tax’. In practice, nobody pays (personal) use tax, myself included.
Washington has a use tax: https://dor.wa.gov/taxes-rates/use-tax
California has a use tax: https://cdtfa.ca.gov/taxes-and-fees/use-tax/
Idaho has a use tax: https://tax.idaho.gov/taxes/sales-use/use-tax/online-guide/
So, all of those people going to Oregon to shop without sales tax and not paying use tax were technically breaking the law, not using a loophole. I’m not judging them, I don’t pay use tax either :)
Do you insist on paying your home tax rate if you go somewhere else and buy food or products?
I’ve never understood people like you that say anything and everything to increase taxes.
How does it make any rational or logical sense that you should pay higher taxes for something?
So when you go to Delaware that has 0% sales taxes, you make sure to log everything and pay taxes to your home state upon return?
> So when you go to Delaware that has 0% sales taxes, you make sure to log everything and pay taxes to your home state upon return?
If you don't, you are technically violating the law. All states with sales tax also have a use tax.
For example, if you are a resident of neighboring Maryland, this is the form you'd need to fill out for purchases you make in Delaware.
https://www.marylandcomptroller.gov/content/dam/mdcomp/tax/f...
He's just stating the law. Eat a cookie and take a nap.
I guess the uk isn’t the only place with lawmakers that have no grasp on technical matters but yolo it anyway
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Walker_Montgomery_Protecti...
> However, it doesn't apply to news sources, online games or the content that is be made is by the service itself or is an application website.
What is an "application website"? I can't seem to find how they're defining that.
It’s unclear how that phrase got into the wiki; the bill text https://billstatus.ls.state.ms.us/documents/2024/html/HB/110... does not seem to mention that phrase.
Thanks, Section 3 is much clearer than the Wikipedia wording.
The law mentions that it does not apply to job application websites.
https://law.justia.com/codes/mississippi/title-45/chapter-38...
That's probably what the wikipedia author meant to say
so does that mean all of linkedin is exempt?
does that also mean that all social media platforms will start a small jobs board?
Yes to your first question, and no to the second question... the law says it must "primarily function" in that respect.
Putting a small jobs board on instagram would not make instagram "primarily function" as a job application website. LinkedIn is primarily a professional networking website - it qualifies.
Yeah the Wikipedia explanation has faulty grammar. I couldn't figure it out either.
My understanding is that this is similar to the law the UK passed recently except instead of verifying age of users for "adult" content, every platform needs to verify (and log) age of all users for all content?
It can't possibly be that ridiculous.
It's Mississippi. Least educated state in the US. Not surprising the elected officials didn't think this one through.
Well, we can blame the voters of Mississippi for their ass-backware representatives, who they evidently like, for these ignorant laws.
Cut the ignoramuses from the US internet until they can learn to be decent people. Serves them right, and well, legally.
As an aside, it would be curious if deepening political polarization creates a trend of blocking IPs from specific states or regions for whatever reason... perhaps in such a scenario there would be interesting relations or comparisons between the digital and physical divides...
If you're using a VPN while inside Missxi and access the site without age verification, would that cause the site to be in violation of the law?
NAL, but yes, I believe that it would still be a violation of the law. That said, laws aren't applied by robots and it's likely they would be given leniency if they could show they actually tried to respect the law.
If they make an honest attempt to comply and a small number of people using VPNs slip through the cracks, if they're ever reported, they'll likely be given a slap on the wrist at most. If they ignore the law or do some obvious half assed attempt to comply and thousands of Mississippi users are still using their site and they get reported, it's far less likely that a judge will be lenient.
IANAL but i don't think using a vpn matters...Because whether a user is using a vpn or otherwise or not, if the user is identified as from Mississippi, that would be the test for whether these guys would need to block or not. Like, if a user from Mississippi uses a vpn, and these guys don't know that and detect that this user's IP is from, say, Arkansas...how would they be held liable? Unless, i'm missing something, right?
Seems to work without issue in states that require age verification for pornography sites. Would assume a site like pornhub has spent money on lawyers
I don’t see how, but the people trying to implement total control of speech, thought, and communication in America are a diabolical and crafty bunch that will likely try putting someone through the wringer for that one day.
The end game here is total control and awareness of who is saying what at any time, in order to allow those messages to be thwarted.
Might it be sufficient to dynamically block anyone that has a registered home address in Mississippi for their payment method? Most ISP's span multiple states.
Google have additional information about IP addresses that updates dynamically based on cell phone, wifi and other magic usage so maybe ask them if they have some javascript that queries their site for more specific city/state details. Also call Pornhub and ask how they were blocking specific states to meet legal requirements.
For the Bluesky ban, I'm not in Mississippi, but whatever IP Geolocation service they're use thinks I my home internet is in Mississippi. It's doubtless that lots of people inside Mississippi but near borders aren't being blocked, because that's just not a thing that's really possible.
If I were in Dreamwidth's shoes, I'd be very much concerned with minimizing legal exposure, not number of users excluded. At 10k/user*day, it's a reasonable choice to block as broadly as makes sense.
Tough for the neighbors, but nitpicking "resident" is not a good choice here.
From my perspective that means "the entire US". I don't live there and I have no idea how to not break this law.
Why geoblock Mississippi but scramble to comply with California right to delete. Political favorites? Easier to implement? Something else?
Maybe already had the implementation ready because of EU regulations?
'Why would you comply with the forth largest economy in the world, but not the second poorest state in the country?'
How is this vaguely sufficient to meet the legal requirements of the law? They know geo-blocking is insufficient.
IANAL, but there’s a question of reasonable burden. Not sure if that applies here, but it’s not unreasonable to say you simply don’t want to do business in a state where the regulations are cost prohibitive. Given they make a reasonable effort to not provide a service to MI, it’s not really on them to police people trying to circumvent a state’s local laws.
Pornhub and BlueSky have done similar in response to this legislation in Texas. Wikipedia and a few other sites blocked the UK to avoid being burdened by their Safety act. Pretty much every streaming platform implements regional geo blocking for licensing reasons.
I’ll be curious to see how things shake out in the long run given the current political climate.
For the record, Wikipedia has not (yet) blocked the UK. They are awaiting official classification by Ofcom of the Wikipedia website. However, the uncertainty is definitely vexing, and the direction this is going is truly worrying.
Good callout! Sadly, I’m unable to update my comment to correct. This whole area of law seems to be busy lately.
> Wikipedia and a few other sites blocked the UK
No? Wikipedia is not blocked in the UK.
IANAL, but if the actual legislation did not either recommend or dictate which method would be either good or even considered valid for purposes of enactment of the law, would it then be subject to interpretation?
Also, for the enforcement agency who is/will be tasked with checking things out here...do they know whether geo-blocking is valid method or not? Its a silly law, don't get me wrong...but if its enforcement validation mechanisms are not up to snuff, i wonder how things will play out - both here in dreamwidth's case and other folks in a similar boat?
Is it insufficient? The law says they need to take commercially reasonable efforts to verify people's age in Mississippi. Geoblocking is a pretty commercially reasonable effort to identify who lives in Mississippi, and they don't provide service to those people.
> How is this vaguely sufficient to meet the legal requirements of the law?
It may not be, if the law can be applied to them.
OTOH, may be sufficient to make it illegal to apply the law to them in the first place. US states do not have unlimited jurisdiction to regulate conduct occurring outside of their borders, but they do have more ability to regulate conduct of entities intentionally doing business within their borders.
I wonder if these state laws are at some point going to collide with Apple’s Private Relay service. It’s included with an iCloud subscription, and very easy to turn on, so I imagine Apple has way, way more users than a typical VPN provider. And they make no effort to ensure your exit node is in the same state as you are. A most it will keep the same “general location,” and there’s an option to let it use anything in the same country and time zone.
Since some idiotic courts have ruled a website’s Terms of Service to be legally binding, why can’t I just say no one from Mississippi is allowed to access my site and be done with it?
I’m not being glib. Honestly, why can’t I? There’s precedent for saying that’s unauthorized access, so the feds (not the state; “Interstate Commerce Clause” and all that) should prosecute the visitor for violating my ToS.
For the same reason a bars don't just ask people to sign a document saying they're 21 in lieu of an ID.
The laws are written in a way where the responsibility for enforcement falls on the operator of the business. In both cases, the business doesn't actually have to verify anything if they don't want to, but if it's found that they're allowing violations to happen, they will be held legally responsible.
You can't contract away something that the law requires of you.
> Since some idiotic courts have ruled a website’s Terms of Service to be legally binding, why can’t I just say no one from Mississippi is allowed to access my site and be done with it?
That would allow you, perhaps, to sue people from MS that used your site for violating the ToS (though, "some idiotic courts have ruled" does not mean "the courts which actually create binding precedent over those that would adjudicate your case have ruled...", so, be careful even there.) But that doesn't actually mean that, if someone from MS used your site and you took no further steps to prevent it you would not be liable to the extent that you did not comply with the age verification law.
> There’s precedent for saying that’s unauthorized access, so the feds (not the state; “Interstate Commerce Clause” and all that) should prosecute the visitor for violating my ToS.
Most things in interstate commerce, except where the feds have specifically excluded the states, are both federal and state jurisdiction, but neither the feds nor the state are obligated, even if applicable law exists which allows them to, to prosecute anyone for violating your ToS. You can (civilly) attempt to do so if you are bothered by it.
sounds similar to how many remote job applications skirt around posting the actual salary range by not allowing residents of NY, etc. to apply
>Unfortunately, the penalties for failing to comply with the Mississippi law are incredibly steep: fines of $10,000 per user from Mississippi who we don't have identity documents verifying age for, per incident -- which means every time someone from Mississippi loaded Dreamwidth, we'd potentially owe Mississippi $10,000. Even a single $10,000 fine would be rough for us, but the per-user, per-incident nature of the actual fine structure is an existential threat.
Reminds me of Silicon Valley. PiperChat has grossly violated COPPA as there was no parental consent form on the app leading to a 21 billion dollar fine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3zU7sV4bJE
https://archive.is/XuUkc
This is happening in Australia, and it's awful legislation.
Bluesky is doing the same in case people here did nor know
https://www.wired.com/story/bluesky-goes-dark-in-mississippi...
Project 2025 at work
Eventually we're going to end up with freedom loving states and puritanical nanny states.
No, we're going to end up with a lot puritanical nanny states policing different things, depending on their flavor of authoritarianism.
I see the larger objective as total control over all speech, thought, and information in more circuitous and pernicious ways than something in one of the poster-boys of “tyranny”.
This is just the start and the trial balloons. The enemy within is a bit nervous about this attack on the most fundamental freedom that the Constitution is protecting, free speech, but they’re also very confident in themselves.
Sometimes, often even, Dreamwidth can do the right thing like this. I fully support them in this fight and hope they win. But let's not pretend banning huge IP ranges for years at a time is new to them.
Dreamwidth has been at the forefront of banning large swaths of the internet. They started doing it years before anyone else. Before the for-profit corporate spidering of HTTP/S content even began causing issues. This is well trod territory and entirely familiar for them and their upstream network provider they like to blame their inability to fix it on.
For those of us unfamiliar with dreamwidth: huh??
I think this has something to do with Cloudflare.
it is just a new better Internet era - everybody to use VPN. Thanks to the conservatives for facilitating such a progress.
For example, these days in Russia awareness and usage of VPN is well beyond any normal country. With Facebook and IG for example blocked for Meta being officially branded an "extremist organization" (by the way Taliban was taken off that list recently, so what do you guys in Menlo Park are cooking what is worse than Taliban? May be some freedom of speech? :) people in Russia of all strata is still using it, now through VPN, many from mobile devices. The thing of note from USSR/Russia here is that habitual violation of unreasonable laws breeds wide disrespect for the system of law as a whole, and it i very hard to reverse the flow.
True, but the next thing, will VPNs be forced to age verify eventually ?
It is possible some US States and maybe the UK will end up like China.
>True, but the next thing, will VPNs be forced to age verify eventually ?
it is like age verifying current generic access to the Internet. Sure, we'll come to this too (the anti-utopias aren't fiction, it is future :), yet we still don't verify such a generic access because it isn't the time yet, the society isn't yet totalitarian enough.
As a preview - in Russia (i'm less familiar with China to comment on it) they do already attack VPN by making it illegal to advertise it, something like this.
Russia is doing quite sophisticated technological enforcement, as well - even if you're running your own VPN server, you need something like V2Ray or Trojan to get through.
[dead]
[flagged]
Glad we didn't have you at the Constitutional Convention.
Also "operate in or leave" doesn't make a lick of sense on THE INTERNET
No, be loud about bad laws.