Overview
- Utah’s SB 73 begins enforcement on May 6, making the state the first in the U.S. to explicitly fold VPN use into age‑verification rules.
- Anyone physically in Utah is treated as accessing a site from Utah even if they use a VPN or proxy to hide their IP address.
- Sites that host material deemed harmful to minors face civil liability if Utah minors get through using masked connections.
- The law also bars covered sites from telling users how to use a VPN to bypass checks, limiting even basic guidance about privacy tools.
- Experts say reliable VPN detection does not exist, so many sites may block known VPN traffic or require ID uploads for all visitors, with a 2% tax on adult-content revenue set to start in October.