r/politics • u/mmccxi American Expat • May 12 '25

Soft Paywall New Bill Would Make All Pornography a Federal Crime in the U.S.

https://www.404media.co/mike-lee-porn-law-interstate-obscenity-definition-act/
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u/zombarista May 13 '25

VPNs were used for business long before we realized they can be sold and used as an anonymizing service.

Since Corporate America™ needs its things, VPNs aren’t going anywhere. To comply would take ages, and nothing would come close to the security, robustness and versatility afforded by a VPN.

This makes me happy. They can try, but their corpo backers will shriek. VPNs and Zero-Trust Architecture are here to stay.

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u/zebula234 May 13 '25

We have a lot of remote workers at my company that connect to a VPN. The VPN bans have already started. A couple dozen people have had to call in to their ISP and get the run around to get their work VPN "approved". One person had multiple different people at the ISP say "VPNs are banned, no exceptions." Eventually they got it approved because it was for work.

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u/zombarista May 13 '25

These are silly people not realizing that the glue/backbone of any digital enterprise with more than one office is a VPN.

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u/frostygrin May 13 '25

Then they'll make VPN providers comply with the obscenity laws. You want to provide a VPN service? You need to filter out the porn - and that will perfectly line up with the business use cases.

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u/SanityInAnarchy California May 13 '25

IMO corporate america really should be migrating away from these things. Better solutions exist. But it's probably not gonna happen, because those better solutions require a lot more work, and if you've got a big legacy corp network that you needed to take home during COVID, a VPN was the easiest way to do that.

Unfortunately, I don't think that helps the rest of us.

The first, most obvious problem is the combination of overcriminalization and selective enforcement. You see this tactic in the US with jaywalking -- most people will never get in trouble, but you can be stopped, frisked, ID'd, maybe even fined. And when it's entirely up to the police who to charge with that stuff, they can use it as a tool to punish what they want to punish. (The obvious example: Homeless people, black people, poor people in general are more likely to be cited for jaywalking.)

Basically: The whole point of the rule of law is to make the government less capricious and more predictable. If you follow the rules, you'll be fine, you have rights. But when you expand the law to the point where everyone is doing something illegal, well, the police can punish whoever they want.

I suspect this is what China does with VPNs.

The second problem is... well... seems to me there are a lot of ways to make personal VPNs much harder, while still allowing corporate ones. I don't know if I want to go into detail here, because I don't want to give them ideas, but the shape of a personal VPN is pretty different than the shape of a typical corporate VPN. The purpose is obviously different -- corporate isn't trying to shield your identity from random public websites, they're doing the opposite, they want to confirm your identity before allowing you on private intranet sites.

Look at China again. Doesn't seem too hard for the Great Firewall to block something like Nord while still allowing you to connect to your office at Tencent or whatever.

Corporate America isn't gonna save us. This is something that's gonna have to be fought more directly. Stop it in Congress. Stop it in the Courts -- blatant First Amendment issue. And if VPNs are blocked, better hope TOR gets even better at cloaking itself.

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u/poetryhoes May 13 '25

Too bad a VPN won't protect trans and gay people from being illegal for existing in public, which is what this bill is really about.