It's official: Utah is the U.S. state closest to banning VPNs

> and relatively little friction if you decide to move to a state that better reflects them.

True when compared to emigrating to another country, which is much harder than most assume.

Moving is extremely disruptive if you have a lot of family and friends nearby, though. You go from having a huge community and social circle to almost nothing. Maybe some work friends to begin seeding a new social life, but everything has to be rebuilt.

This is why “if you don’t like it, you can leave” (the parent commenter didn’t claim this, I’m being it up separately) is not a good argument for tyrannical government decisions that get imposed on citizens of a location. They are invested in that place and have built lives there. Telling them to abandon it all and start over somewhere else is not a reasonable response. Some things have to be fought.

I don’t understand how this is related. As I understand it, many of the websites affected by these laws did chose to blanket-ban those states from accessing them.

This VPN law is a weak attempt to claim that it’s not enough to geo-block people, similar to the UK governing bodies that are trying to go after websites that have geoblocked the UK because they don’t believe that’s sufficient.

Uh, that's not going to fly.

We use a VPN to enable remote users to access our internal network for things we don't want exposed to the public at large. And we're not a tech company.

This really sounds like someone who has no fucking clue trying to legislate away all the loopholes to their other shitty legislation.

As a Canadian citizen, this is one of the things I envy about the USA the most: having 50 different choices. There is currently a lot of tension in Canada between provinces like Alberta and Quebec which want very different things but are bound by the same set of laws. In Canada you are given some choice regarding geography (although the vast majority of population lives within 100km of the southern border, so in reality if you want to live in a city there isn’t much choice), but very little choice when it comes to laws and general governance.

I personally would love to live in a western state like oregon, arizona, or new mexico where I feel like there is an appropriate balance between freedom, geography, and government for my lifestyle.

Sure but there’s also a constitution. And inhibiting speech and expression by attacking anonymity and privacy is a violation.

Of course, SCOTUS may not see it that way. But clearly this is an imposition of the age verification strategy in project 2025, which is meant to be an imposition of Christian religious values on everyone.