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.
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.