Which states are currently trying to ban VPNs?

Which states are trying to ban vpns? Current data

Finding reliable information on which states are trying to ban vpns helps users navigate emerging digital regulations. Understanding clear administrative facts protects user rights and clarifies legal liability. Learn the details of the regulation to avoid losing money unjustly or facing unexpected restrictions.

Understanding the Wave of State Legislation Targeting VPNs

The question of which states are trying to ban vpns is complex and can be linked to many different factors, primarily state-level age verification laws. To be perfectly clear, no state has successfully passed or maintained an outright, blanket ban on personal virtual private network (VPN) usage for everyday tasks like online banking or secure remote work.

Instead, what we are seeing across the country is a series of legislative attempts to target how people use VPNs to bypass age-restricted website filters. These bills usually try to hold websites liable if they allow users to skirt digital age gates by masking their IP addresses.

For anyone using a VPN for basic privacy, data protection, or secure Wi-Fi connections, normal operations remain perfectly legal across the United States. However, state lawmakers are increasingly viewing these encryption tools as loopholes that complicate their efforts to police internet access for minors. This friction has turned a handful of states into battlegrounds over digital privacy rights. But there is one critical technical misunderstanding that almost every tutorial and news report glosses over - I will explain exactly why these state mandates face an impossible math problem in the enforcement breakdown below.

Utah SB 73: The Nation's First Law Confronting VPN Circumvention

Utah became the absolute focal point of this national debate when lawmakers passed Senate Bill 73, formally known as the Online Age Verification Amendments. The law targets any commercial website where more than one third of the platforms content is deemed harmful to minors. Under its provisions, websites must employ reasonable age verification methods for any user physically located within the state. The unique and highly controversial piece of SB 73 is how it treats location-masking tools like VPNs.

Under Utahs law, a persons physical presence in the state dictates their legal requirements, completely ignoring the external IP address a VPN provides. If an adult in Salt Lake City connects to a VPN server located in Germany, the visited platform is still legally responsible for identifying them as a Utah resident and forcing an age check. Platforms face steep civil penalties reaching up to $2,500 per violation for failing to verify these users. Furthermore, the statute explicitly bars platforms from publishing guides or instructions on how users can leverage VPNs to bypass these digital filters.

I will admit that when I first read the text of SB 73, my hands felt cold with a bit of genuine panic. As someone who has relied heavily on strict privacy tools for over a decade, seeing a state government aggressively write VPN restrictions directly into law felt like a dangerous precedent. However, the reality on the ground shifted dramatically. On September 24, 2026, U.S. District Judge David Barlow granted a preliminary injunction that formally blocked Utahs aggressive VPN tracking rules, noting that flawless geolocation tracking of encrypted traffic is a technical impossibility.

Wisconsin and Michigan: Legislative Proposals and Vetoes

While Utah pushed its rules all the way to a federal court battle, both Wisconsin and Michigan have served as major cautionary tales regarding overreached states attempting to restrict vpns. In Wisconsin, lawmakers introduced Assembly Bill 105 and Senate Bill 130. The original text of these companion bills took an incredibly aggressive stance, demanding that age-restricted platforms actively identify and block any inbound web traffic arriving from known VPN servers. This sparked massive national blowback from cybersecurity firms and digital rights advocates.

The pushback worked. Wisconsin legislators quickly realized that forcing sites to block all VPN connections would inadvertently lock out millions of everyday citizens using secure networks for work, healthcare, or personal finance. Lawmakers stripped the anti-VPN language out of the bill before final passage, and Governor Tony Evers ultimately vetoed the remaining age-verification framework due to data privacy and security concerns. Let us cut to the chase: using a VPN in Wisconsin remains completely unhindered today.

Michigan took an even more alarming approach with House Bill 4938, often referred to as the Anticorruption of Public Morals Act. This proposal attempted to require internet service providers (ISPs) to actively monitor subscriber traffic, detect known circumvention tools, and outright block encrypted tunnels or VPN connections. The draft bill proposed draconian maximum penalties, including up to 25 years in prison and $500,000 fines. Fortunately, the bill was widely panned by tech policy experts as structurally unworkable and it failed to advance through the Michigan legislature.

The Technical Reality: Why a VPN Ban Imposes an Impossible Mandate

Here is the critical technical issue I mentioned earlier, and it highlights why these laws fall apart the second they hit real-world deployment. When a user activates an encrypted VPN tunnel, their real IP address is entirely masked and replaced by the IP address of the VPN server. A website in California receiving traffic from that server can only see that the connection originates from a data center, perhaps in Chicago or London.

The website has absolutely no programmatic way to peer through that encryption and discover if the human clicking the link is physically sitting in Utah, Wisconsin, or Mumbai.

Because perfect geolocation does not exist for masked traffic, these laws create what digital rights groups call a liability trap. If a state mandates that a platform must verify the age of every local resident - even those hiding behind a VPN - the platform is left with only two real choices to avoid multi-thousand-dollar state fines. They can either completely shut down their services inside that specific state, or they can aggressively block every single known VPN IP address on earth. This clumsy, all-or-nothing approach is exactly why federal courts have stepped in to halt enforcement.

Status of Anti-VPN Legislation by State

Utah (Senate Bill 73)

1. Personal VPN use remains 100% legal; no individual penalties exist for using encryption tools
2. Holds platforms liable for verifying age of physical residents, regardless of VPN use; bans sites from sharing VPN setup guides
3. Enforcement is officially blocked by a federal preliminary injunction as of late September 2026

Wisconsin (AB 105 / SB 130)

1. Zero restrictions; VPN access and privacy protections remain fully intact across the state
2. Original draft required websites to actively identify and block traffic originating from known VPN servers
3. VPN-blocking text was completely removed by lawmakers; the broader bill was ultimately vetoed by the Governor

Michigan (House Bill 4938)

1. No impact; the bill was never enacted into law, meaning all privacy services operate normally
2. Attempted to force local internet service providers to actively spy on, monitor, and block encrypted proxy tunnels
3. Stalled completely in the legislative process; failed to pass or gain broader traction due to severe security risks

A Remote Worker Navigating State Restrictions

David, a 34-year-old independent cybersecurity consultant based in Salt Lake City, Utah, relies heavily on commercial VPNs to audit client systems and secure his daily network traffic. When headlines began announcing that Utah was targeting VPN use, he faced a massive wave of confusion and worry about his professional tools.

His first reaction was to look for specialized stealth protocols to hide his VPN traffic from local detection mechanisms. However, the initial friction was intense - his corporate connections slowed down to an unusable crawl, and several client dashboards blocked his obfuscated IP addresses entirely.

The breakthrough came when he thoroughly reviewed the court filings from civil liberties groups. He realized that the state legislature was not criminalizing the ownership or use of VPNs for ordinary citizens, but was instead imposing an unworkable tracking mandate on commercial web platforms.

With the federal court issuing a preliminary injunction against the law in September 2026, David returned to his standard high-speed encryption protocols, secure in the knowledge that his digital privacy tools remain entirely lawful to use.