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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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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