It's unfortunately no longer enough to force websites to check your government-issued ID before you can access certain content, because politicians have now discovered that people are using Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to protect their privacy and bypass these invasive laws. Their solution? Entirely ban the use of VPNs.
I read tfa and banning use of VPNs is, in fact, a possibility to be compliant. Because how exactly do you determine a visitor to Pornhub is actually a VPN user from Wisconsin? The website can’t, presumably, trace the user’s location (defeating the entire purpose of the VPN), so that leaves VPN providers as the next responsible party.
Nothing in this bill would lead to the use of VPNs being banned. Any given website could hypothetically ban the use of VPNs to access it, but that’s not a ban on VPNs the way the headline makes it out to be.
It’s impossible, which means that in order to be compliant, websites would have to simply stop serving Wisconsin, like they already have with several other US states. There is nothing preventing either you or Pornhub from sending whatever 1s and 0s you want to some random Mullvad server in Canada. They can’t even punish Mullvad for this, as the text of the bill explicitly “prohibits business entities from knowingly and intentionally publishing or distributing material harmful to minors on the Internet,” and any good VPN has no idea what material you’re accessing via their servers.
You’re making a very technical, logical interpretation of the bill. The problem is that the bill was written by illogical, naive people. This brand of government has already proven they want to hold VPNs accountable and have tried to force tracking into them. Having a bulletproof defense doesn’t mean governments can’t try to drag them through court anyway, especially when VPNs have already been publicly vilified as something only bad people use.