If you think they will stop at a mere "technical impossibility" I have bad news for you folks, they will just ban all the traffic they can't track, in Utah, UK, anywhere;)

platforms are left with an impossible choice: completely block all VPN traffic nationwide or withdraw access from Utah entirely

Is it even possible to reliably know that a connection is from a VPN? Anyone can proxy through a random hosting provider.

It won't route around self-censorship that arises out of surveillance

Nor will it take a stand against SNI which is a dead simple means of implementing censorship that's in widespread use every day for years

As we’ve said time and time again: the internet will always route around censorship.

Is this still true, or has it become a truism? It seems nations like Iran and China (and events like Kashmir come to mind) have progressed the state-of-the-art and playbook to where we can't actually say it definitively will route around it.

Now seeing that the US and EU are flirting with these similar restrictions it's making me wonder how we'll be able to keep hold of these principles.

Maybe my concern with that adage is ultimately its passive voice, since it takes 'active' action by people to give us those options, and will probably take more actions by more people to keep it alive now.

It even went so far as to prohibit websites from offering instructions on how to use a VPN to bypass these checks

How is that not a blatant first amendment violation?

Seems like we need a fundamental challenge to the concept that you have any jurisdiction whatsoever.

Utah's VPN law demands a technical impossibility

How does legislation work in the US? How can an impossible law pass? Is it just some boomer stomping his feet like a toddler "I know what I want, and I want it now" without consulting any technical experts, and then private organizations like the EFF and courts have to clean up the mess?

Utah is one of a few states that bans gambling. It is logically consistent for them to want to prevent people from using VPNs while in Utah to get around that to do things like access gambling websites, sports books, or prediction markets.

That said, it is fairly difficult (and almost impossible for self-made VPNs/tunnels...). The court was right, but it kind of sucks for Utah in this case. They should have the right in some way to uphold their gambling laws.

Sorry, but if you haven't seen how bad some people and places can be when it comes to that stuff, you probably won't get why.

EDIT: HN is ratelimiting my ability to reply to replies again, for some reason, so my response follows:

Yes, but they have the uncomfortable reality of having to police (I mean in the classical, community way, not an Orwellian way) the results of it -- with resources that are scarecely available, or unavailable. Crime goes up, domestic violence increases, rowdiness and noise complaints go up, fights increase, addiction increases, money problems and lenders get involved....

I never liked social issues being called "public health" issues but in some cases, where things are literally outlawed and more than a certain amount of people with certain predilections take advantage of opportunities to skirt the law more than a few times, it sort of becomes so...

Which usually means less other kinds of freedoms for the rest of the people in that location. Some places I have lived with large online gambling populations have been frankly disturbing.