On Sept. 11, Michigan representatives proposed an internet content ban bill unlike any of the others we’ve seen: This particularly far-reaching legislation would ban not only many types of online content, but also the ability to legally use any VPN.
The bill, called the Anticorruption of Public Morals Act and advanced by six Republican representatives, would ban a wide variety of adult content online, ranging from ASMR and adult manga to AI content and any depiction of transgender people. It also seeks to ban all use of VPNs, foreign or US-produced.
Main issue I have with this article, and a lot of articles on this topic, is it doesn’t address the issue of youth access to porn. I think any semi-intelligent person knows this is a parenting issue, but unfortunately that cat’s out of the bag, thanks to the right. “Proliferation of porn” is the '90s crime scare (that never really died) all over again. If a politician or industry expert is speaking against bills like this, their talking points have to include:
- Privacy-respecting alternatives that promise parents that their precious babies won’t be able to access that horrible dangerous porn! (I don’t argue that porn can’t be dangerous, but this is yet another disingenuous right-wing culture (holy) war)
- Addressing that vagueness in the bill sets up the government as morality police (it’s right there in the title of the bill, FFS), and NOBODY in a “free” country should ever want that.
- Stop saying it can be bypassed with technology. The VPN ban in this bill is a reaction to talking points like that.
- Recognize and call out that this has nothing to do with protecting children and everything to do with a religious minority imposing its will on the rest of the country (plenty of recent examples to pull from here).
Unfortunately this is becoming enough of “A Thing” that the left is going to have to, once again, be seen doing “something” about it. So they have to thread a needle of “protecting kids,” while respecting the privacy of their parents who want their kids protected and want to look at porn, and protecting businesses that require secure communications.
Considering how many people need to use VPNs to telecommute, this seems like it would be a non-starter. But you can’t discount the sheer stupidity and hubris of Republicans these days.
Many countries are trying to figure out how to ban VPNs. I expect it will end up with big corporations and rich people being able to
pay a bribebuy a licence to use encryption and VPNs, while ordinary people will not be able to afford it. Or they will just require ISPs to block suspected VPN traffic from home connections. If people find workarounds it’s still a pretext to arrest anyone inconvenient to the government and ban them from using the internet to organize.I expect it will end up with big corporations and rich people being able to
pay a bribebuy a licence to use encryption and VPNs, while ordinary people will not be able to afford it.That’s a good thing Wireguard and OpenVPN are open source and available for free to everyone.
Or they will just require ISPs to block suspected VPN traffic from home connections. If people find workarounds it’s still a pretext to arrest anyone inconvenient to the government
I mean, China and Russia have been on this mission for quite some time now and have failed over and over. Doubt the US will be any different.
It’s not about buying the technology though: it’s about buying the right to use it without being punished by the law.
Companies like L3Harris have to use VPNs just to access their emails because the securities required on government contracts. Whoever suggested this bill is just an idiot.
This is the right answer
Banning VPNs would be an unmitigated disaster and anyone who suggests that it’s a good idea has absolutely no idea what they’re talking about and should never be allowed to make tech policy again because they are a massive idiot.
Businesses, institutions, and even the government itself all require the use of VPNs to remain secure. VPNs are vital to functioning IT infrastructure everywhere.
Additionally, such a move wouldn’t even stop people from accessing porn (which isn’t even what VPNs are for), all it would really do is break IT security everywhere.
I want to see one state pass this (not mine ofc) just to see the carnage of an entire state full of companies that suddenly cease operations.
Businesses, institutions, and even the government itself all **require** the use of VPNs to remain secure. VPNs are vital to functioning IT infrastructure everywhere.
This is the first thing I thought about. Bills like these always allow for vulnerabilities that would affect the entire nation, themselves included. It’s extremely short sided.
I mean. They’d only enforce the ban on VPN providers that don’t provide logs to the government. I get what you mean from a technology standpoint. But, in actual implementation of the law it would do exactly what they want. They’re not gonna ban your work VPN. They just want to track what everyone is doing online.
That in itself introduces numerous security problems, still incredibly stupid and all this surveillance data makes for a hacker goldmine. Not like governments have a great IT security track record.
It’s not government. It’s about passing tech infrastructure entirely into the hands of the tech Oligarchs. Forcing VPN companies to sell or integrate Palantir/CIA/FBI backends in order to keep operating in the US.
You’re thinking too much about how the legislation is worded. It doesn’t matter when the actual implementation will just be to increase the ability for tech oligarchs to spy on all citizens. That’s the material goal. Your security doesn’t matter. The oligarchs will implement it to protect their own security and monopoly on data. That’s it. That’s all that this is meant to do. The old fucks in the legislative branch don’t have to actually understand it or write that down. They will just pass it off to tech companies to implement how they see fit. And enforce it on providers when they are told to by the Oligarchs. It’s not smart. It doesn’t have to be. It’s malicious handoff to tech oligarchs to handle and enforce as they see fit.
This is exactly the color of the issue. Everyone should read this.
The wording of legislation is how legislation works?
Might want to look up the Chevron deference. Something that was actually of topic in a recent 2024 supreme court ruling. Can rant about how and why the change to it occurred but that’s a little off topic.
The TLDR is that federal agencies have the power to interpret and defer technical parts of legislation to experts within that agency to enact the “purpose” of the legislation.
In reality this is a good thing in a well operated federal government. The FDA doesn’t have to defer to a judge for every specific implementation. But we are not in a well functioning federal government. We are passing off power tech Oligarchs to control things how they see fit.
WHEN, HOW, and WHO the law is enforced to is significantly more important that how legislation is worded when it passes. I’m trying to explain what the material result of the law will be to my best ability. The law will be enforced in favor of tech monopolies. It’ll be another tool for them to use state power to their benefit.
Most VPNs do not use a separate VPN provided. What about places that host their own? My employer would never open their logs to the us government (hosted outside the us). I would never willingly open my own logs to the government - they have to not only physically invade my house but have to decrypt my drives, and hope they did it quickly enough that any incriminating logs haven’t been purged
It’s not about stopping random people hosting their own VPN. It’s about collecting data on the majority of the population. You’re thinking too hard about it.
How do you even define a VPN? Is SSH tunnelling allowed then?
For that matter, how do you define porn?
10 hour video of a woman encouraging you to be a better person.
yeah a vpn ban would fuck up networks
Just like world-wide tariffs will disrupt supply chains.
They don’t care, they are dumber than rocks and twice as corrupt.
What the hell are rocks up to? Whats next, youre gonna tell me stones are up to no good.
For rock and stone!
The problem is that influencers have shilled stupid VPN services so much that even legislatures think they know what they are and think the primary use for the technology is circumvention and privacy.
They have no idea about all the IPsec tunnels providing site-to-site VPNs for all their businesses. Or how VPN protocols like GRE, which while providing no security on their own, are still very useful for tunneling protocols through different network stacks.
So what you are saying is this is a fantastic RTO strategy. /s
But yeah, I work for an international company, setting up the IT infrastructure so that each of those individual offices have a standard security policy and connection whitelists, and then requiring an on-site IT person to manage each of those sounds horrible.
VPNs is not just for remote workers. It’s used by corporations who don’t want to pay for a direct connect to federate with their work sites.
The only way a VPN ban is going to work is if they make a carve-out for corporations.
Which, let’s face it, it’s Republicans so there’s a one-to-one chance that language will be there.
Couldn’t a VPN service make a corporation and attain exemption?
VPNs are needed for way more than people working from home. It’s hard to understate how spectacularly stupid banning VPNs would be in terms of business alone, never mind all the other problems it would cause.
Banning VPNs would be an unmitigated disaster and anyone who suggests that it’s a good idea has absolutely no idea what they’re talking about and should never be allowed to make tech policy again because they are a massive idiot.
You’re right. Sadly, this have no bearing on the people actually deciding federal laws in the US, if I am to trust the news cycle from the last 10 or so months.
The damage that would stem from such things is guaranteed to span far and large :(
Take a look at the UK’s current attempts to do similar.
Old bigots completely divorced from reality making the rules everyone (else) has to follow.
I suspect what will actually happen is this bill will go nowhere. If it starts to go somewhere, business interests will step in and squash it because of the many, many, many problems it would cause.
That could spell trouble for VPN owners and other internet users who leverage these tools to improve their privacy, protect their identities online, prevent ISPs from gathering data about them or increase their device safety when browsing on public Wi-Fi.
Is the extent of their knowledge on VPNs just what they heard from a NordVPN commercial? Not once in the article do they mention corporate VPNs.
Unfortunately this is becoming enough of “A Thing” that the left is going to have to, once again, be seen doing “something” about it.
I completely disagree with this sentiment and any Democrat that agrees with this isn’t on "the left, but one more diet-Republican who exists solely to legitimize everything the right is doing at every turn.
I don’t understand how OP can say that second part with a straight face when this bill doesn’t even have the support of more than a handful of Michigan House Republicans and seems to have zero chance of making it out of committee there
That second quote is what OP is saying here. They’re trying to frame this debate in a light most favorable to Republicans, as if internet censorship is the forgone conclusion and it’s just a matter of figuring out how to do it.
Sorry, I didn’t even realize OP was the one who said that. Will edit. And I agree, this sentiment is awful
They are testing the waters. Just because THIS bill won’t pass it doesn’t mean dismiss it. They really, really, really want to take away privacy as a concept, they want to get ALL up in your private life and they would love to make special camps to send you to if you don’t conform to the picture they want for America.
After this we will see more and more vague and abstract attempts at carving away smaller slices of privacy. Regulations on SOME vpn’s, the closing of a few major open-source software systems like any website hosting downloads of things like TOR (“it’s a terrorist tool! Antifa coordinates with it!”) and the like. Then attempts at defining what a VPN is, defining what “porn” is, and such moves to prepare for more sweeping legislation that will sound more appealing to congresses, both state and federal.
they don’t understand it. How are you going to stop people from having a dedicated server outside the country and then setting up their own VPNs? Wireguard is free and easy to access, how do you stop that?
If I want to open up my personal VPN to a bunch of Americans to use for free then what? I’m not American, my server isn’t in America, so why can’t I just give access to a few Americans? Hell my server would be great cause it’s located in a University so…student discounts!
You ever tried setting up such a server anonymously in a way that can’t be tracked by American authorities? It can be done, but they’ve already made that difficult and/or expensive.
Just buy a VPS with crypto? It’s not expensive, it’s a few bucks a month
Yeah it does look like maybe that’s got easier since I looked into it, although the prices I see are maybe 3x the cost of the average VPN and of course being securely anonymous is still beyond the abilities of most of us.
I don’t know about 3x, I run my VPS on $5 a month but there are even cheaper options around even paying with crypto
Bear in mind that paying with crypto doesn’t make you anonymous unless you’re careful about it and use monero or something. If you did that and avoided giving any other identifying info to the provider, I’d be curious to know where to sign up for that.
So… Use Monero and a fake name?
It’s quite possible they will make an exception for corporate VPNs while banning them for the rest of us. There will be a big fee to buy a corporate encryption licence, unaffordable to the peasants.
If you can block access to commercial VPNs and render anyone else using VPNs liable to prosecution you achieve what they want.
You can’t block commercial VPNs. I can put a commercial VPN website up right now, it takes like a second. All I need is a crypto payment address and I’ll share my VPN servers
Ok, and how are you going to tell people that it exists? Not through YouTube sponsor slots, because you’ll get deleted quicker than you put it up.
So only a tiny number of people will know that your VPN exists. That’s “good enough” for the censorious.
On Lemmy, of course!
Lemmy doesn’t have that many users… How are you going to reach the people who aren’t arch users ;)
Seriously though, tech enthusiasts live a technological solution but a ban is a societal thing and it doesn’t have to be perfect. Look at China.
I’m using a VPN in China
Jesus.
As far as I can tell, you are arguing that it won’t become impossible to use a VPN. But no-one has said that it will be, and what I and others are trying to point out, is that VPN usage will become more difficult and rare. The vast majority of people will be restricted from viewing the content that the government objects to, whatever that is.
If you have anything to say about that rather than repeating the point that, yes, for the knowledgeable, for the tech-literate, for the people with the will and the spare time and the energy, VPN usage will still be available, feel free to. Maybe you think that actually everyone will use a VPN - why? why won’t a massive reduction in marketed options not reduce usage massively? Maybe you think that actually it doesn’t matter - why? why does it not matter that the average person will be unable to get information censored by the government?
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Um, how the actual fuck are businesses supposed to operate where some regressive dumbfucks have outlawed VPNs?
Also, never underestimate the ability of a set of dumbasses doing some damage to this country - for one thing, see the asshole in the WH right now doing all kinds of self-owns to this country.
Secondly, I’m old enough to remember things like the V-chip and the Clipper chip and the government going after Phil Zimmerman. All of these things were rather stupid. And that was during the Clinton administration, which, sure, they were right-leaning as well…were not fucking crazy right wing.
Oh, businesses will get an exception for their company owned hardware, I’m sure. Suck it, pleb!
[…] would ban a wide variety of adult content online, [… including] any depiction of transgender people.
Obviously will fail. Not because it blatantly violates the first amendment, or because banning VPNs is absurd: but because it would hinder republicans from secretly jerking it to femboys.
The love to crash grindr. Every convention, they have the servers glowing. Not a gay butthole unfilled. That should be their slogan.
NO VPN!
And the corporate world comes to a screeching halt.
These fuckwads don’t even understand anything about what they’re trying to legislate.
When shit starts being monitored, I want to see the legislators’ traffic public first.
And the corporate world comes to a screeching halt.
In theory, businesses would be required to register their VPNs and… idk, this would limit access to them somehow?
Much like with the Assault Weapons Ban and the assorted online porn bans and strip club bans and dry counties and SEC rules on insider trading, etc, etc, etc a lot of this boils down to “how hard do you want to work in order to enforce this?”
And the short answer is “we only want an excuse to arrest people arbitrarily”. So a VPN can quickly because a “everyone with an Internet connection is a criminal suspect”. And then you just harass the people you want to harass under cover of “we thought you had kiddie porn” as an excuse
I once worked for a banking transaction company (or something like that, I did their network and telecom support, none of the actual business) and they had offices in Russia. I was told that since VPNs are more restricted there, but required for the business, they had to have a special application with the government to be allowed to have the site to site VPN work.
I imagine they’d try to do the same, as well as grant them another way to be in the pocket of or have some control over businesses. If the government has to approve your necessary security software, you’ll want to stay on their good side.
It also seeks to ban all use of VPNs, foreign or US-produced.
That doesn’t sound like they plan on any exceptions. That sounds like the end of all business in that state.
When shit starts being monitored, I want to see the legislators’ traffic public first.
Oh my sweet summer child. Of course these laws won’t apply to them.
And if they do, they will make up shit to use the dirt you dug up against them against you.
Kind of like how when a cop shoots a black guy they look for whatever parking ticket they got 10 years prior as proof he is a cracking smoking cap busting gangsta who was itching for a bullet. Never being slightly concerned for the cop’s violent history or misconduct in various police forces.
Now now I didn’t say they were going to allow that.
Corporate VPNs generally don’t route www traffic, keeping that separate is kind of the point.
So unless you can convince your job to provide you porn, you’re out of luck.
Corporate VPNs generally don’t route www traffic.
Few corporate VPN’s don’t route www traffic. split tunnel in a large corporation It’s an infoleak waiting to happen.
is it doesn’t address the issue of youth access to porn. I think any semi-intelligent person knows this is a parenting issue
There sure are a lot of stupid fucking people then, huh?
Unfortunately this is becoming enough of “A Thing” that the left is going to have to, once again, be seen doing “something”
Personally I think the left should hammer in on “The right are too lazy and incompetent to raise their kids. They want the government to do it for them. No one who’s too unwilling or unable to spend time with their kids should be in government” or something like that. Just rub their noses in how stupid, lazy, and incompetent, the right is. Because they are. They are the worst people.
There sure are a lot of stupid fucking people then, huh?
I mean… yeah? Seen any election results in the past few years?
The fact that Republicans get any votes past the year 2012 is enough to convince me that about 1/3 of Americans are dumber than a box of rocks.
we built our national public education system around breeding compliant factory workers, then cut all the factory jobs.
So are the third that don’t bother voting.
Amen to your point about rubbing their faces in it.
The absolutely stunning level of hypocrisy from the Republicans who claim to be the party of small government has become such a laughing stock. Or at least I would be laughing if they didn’t have control of everything right now. Fuck.
The trans bit is key here. First that, then anything “promoting homosexuality”. It’s in Project 2025 that the porn bans are about criminalising LGBTQ people and allies.
Oh but they won’t stop there. Fascism NEVER stops at the first target.
Trans and gay people to the camps today. Tomorrow interracial couples. The day after that? Anyone looking at interracial porn. We can only imagine where it goes from there, but likely it won’t be a return to an imagined 1950’s sitcom utopia.
Sure, but the porn laws are specifically about targeting LGBTQ people.
It actually gets worse than I outlined above, because I was in a hurry when I wrote that.
So, you make porn illegal and you define “porn” as anything “pro-LGBTQ”. That’s all books which feature LGBTQ characters, all organisations which support LGBTQ people, all people who are openly LGBTQ themselves.
Now you’ve got a school librarian who purged the books she was told to purge but accidentally missed one. A student checks it out, his parents see it and recognise it, now that librarian is guilty of distributing pornography to a minor. If the book features an LGBTQ character who is a minor, then that librarian is guilty of distributing child pornography.
And that’s not even as worrying as it gets. Because everything above is in Project 2025, but that’s not the entire limit. Over the last couple of years Republican politicians have been floating (and even trying to introduce bills which would actualise) the idea of the punishment for sexual offenses involving minors to be the death penalty. They’re not there yet (and bills have thus far been defeated), but that’s the direction of travel. That’s the end goal. A pseudo-legal framework to justify executing people for being openly LGBTQ (held hands with your girlfriend in public? A 17 year old saw you holding hands. You are now guilty of a sexual offense involving a minor), or anything other than publicly anti-LGBTQ. Off to the camps with you!
So, yes you’re right that they’ll use whatever weapon they can against whichever group they can - historically, fascists often target LGBTQ people first, and at the moment it’s easier to start with trans people than explicitly going after gay people - yet.
But the anti-porn laws are explicitly about targetting LGBTQ people. And they’re only part of the way down the roadmap.
Can we get a list of the names of the representatives supporting this?
Any other identifiable information would be great as well.
Fuck this social contract.
how about their browsing histories?
What, and violate their privacy? Know your place peasant. /s
Bro can we not?
I thought I got lucky to be born into a family that was able to leave China, and I could browse the internet freely in the US. What the fuck y’all? Just let me have my unlimited access to entertainment in peace mmkay?
So… fucking… cooked…
Blatent First Amendment violation.
I mean what even is gonna be the difference between fucking CCP and this BS.
(Canadaaa plssss lemmme innn? 🥺👉👈❓️
Australia? 👀)You seem to be picking the absolute worst countries if you’re looking for freedom, especially online. Australia is already worse than the US in many ways, and Canada not too far behind. How about Europe?
I mean what even is gonna be the difference between fucking CCP and this BS.
Most notably, I’d say the fact that the CCP is a competent government leading the country into its golden age, while the Republican US government is driving its country into collapse. We can all have differing opinions about the CCP, but at least we have to give them credit where it’s due.
ban porn
Lol, good luck with hat
ban VPN
Lol, good luck with that too, maybe ban HTTPS while you’re at it?
Mind you though, this bill has diddly squat to do with porn. Republicans don’t really care about that especially since they’re usually too preoccupied with abusing their own children for their sexual needs. Blocking porn is just a cherry on the cake so that they have even more poetry and control
This is mainly about the VPN and encryption. Those are technologies that can be used to pass along true facts, true news, organize protects without them knowing.
You can’t really break all types of encryption with one bill, but many aimed at the same goal just might do the trick
I feel that encryption should be enshrined as a human right
Make all their grindr accounts public
Just like they did with their Ashley Madison accounts.
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We are so past that shit.
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Will it ban their Grindr access though?
Only for non-closeted gays. But for Republicans who only do it to remind themselves of the evils of gay sex it’ll be readily accessible.
“If you removed all the porn from the internet you would be left with one website, titled “Bring Back the Porn””
Scrubs was way ahead of its time.
It’s never been about the children, either. It’s been about reigning control and power which is why a lot of Liberals get on board with these bills too. One of the reasons i felt so disgusted to vote for Hillary Clinton was because of her stance on censorship in the 90’s. Today it’s succeeding in porn. Tomorrow it will start succeeding in literature.
The Clintons are actual shitstains who are part of this two-pronged approach to siphon as much power away from the people and into the hands of the ruling class as possible.
