If you’ve been following along with some of the legislation moving through various states around age verification and VPNs, it can start to feel like a lot of disconnected stories that don’t really add up to anything. But when you zoom out and look at the direction everything is trending, a pretty clear picture starts to emerge and it’s one worth paying attention to.
The surface level conversation is about adult websites and whether minors can access them. Totally legitimate concern. Nobody is arguing that kids should have unrestricted access to whatever they want online. But the solutions being proposed keep creating problems that go way beyond the original issue and that’s where things get complicated.
Take the Utah situation. The state passed age verification requirements for adult sites which meant visitors had to upload a government ID to get access. Most people said forget it and either stopped visiting those sites or started using VPNs to appear like they were in a different state. So then Utah passed another bill trying to stop companies from telling their users about VPNs as a workaround. And Meta responded to similar legislation in New Mexico by threatening to just shut off Instagram and Facebook in the state entirely rather than deal with the liability.
Think about that for a second. A company threatening to pull its platform from an entire state because the state wants age verification. That tells you something about how much leverage these platforms have and how little appetite they have for any kind of accountability.
The VPN blocking idea sounds logical on paper until you actually think through how it would work. VPN services use thousands of rotating IP addresses. Trying to block all of them is genuinely not feasible. You’d spend forever playing catchup and you’d inevitably block legitimate users in the process. It’s not a real solution, it’s theater.
And the thing about theater is that it doesn’t actually solve the problem it claims to. What it does do is create a paper trail of compliance. The company posts a statement saying they don’t condone VPN use to bypass state laws, they check their legal box, and everything else stays exactly the same. Meanwhile the legislation establishes a precedent that the government can dictate what information companies are allowed to share with their users about legal tools. That’s a weird power to hand over even if the immediate application seems harmless.
Discord got pulled into this conversation too when age verification requirements started being floated for the platform. Discord is used heavily by fan communities and niche interest groups, people who want a relatively private space to talk about things they’re into without it being connected to their real identity. Requiring a drivers license to create an account completely changes what the platform is and who feels comfortable using it.
YouTube has been going through something similar in certain regions, requiring account verification in ways that didn’t exist before. The rollout has been uneven and there’s been some backlash but the direction is clear. More identity verification, less anonymity, more data tied to your real self across more platforms.
Here’s what all of this is building toward if you follow the trajectory. A version of the internet where every account, every interaction, and every piece of content you access is tied to a verified real world identity. Which sounds fine if you trust every government and every company that has access to that data to always use it responsibly and never abuse it. If that trust feels misplaced to you then the direction this is heading should probably concern you a little bit.
