Utah's Impossible Geolocation Law Hits a Wall
Censorship blocking · 13.10.2026

Utah came up with a law requiring websites to pinpoint a user's location with one hundred percent accuracy. That technology doesn't exist. Lawmakers decided that wasn't their problem.

SB 73 required adult websites to either calculate every visitor's physical location and block users from Utah, or verify the age of absolutely everyone — just in case a Utah resident was hiding behind a VPN. The law also banned sites from even explaining how VPNs work. Utah appears to be the first state in the country to declare war on virtual private networks personally.

The logic behind the law was airtight: since an IP address can be masked with a VPN, you need to verify the age of all 28 million users of a platform — whether they're in Salt Lake City, Anchorage, or Honolulu. Just in case.

Federal Judge Barlow wasn't impressed with that logic and blocked the law's VPN provisions. The main argument is beautifully obvious: the law demands a technical precision in geolocation that simply doesn't exist in reality, while threatening liability for failing to achieve it. Strict liability for the impossible — a convenient idea.

The state's proposed business rules sounded even funnier: implement "commercially reasonable geolocation-masking detection systems." In practice, this meant tracking connection latency and device time zones — methods that glitch under normal network conditions and reliably confuse law-abiding users with violators.

The bottom line is simple: instead of protecting children, we got a road to total surveillance of everyone. The court ruled this violated the constitutional ban on unduly burdening businesses and people outside the state.

Utah's legislature is already hinting it will rewrite the law next session. But a precedent has been set: you can't hide behind protecting minors to demand mass surveillance and outlaw VPNs. The internet, as always, will find a way around it — it always does.

Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/10/court-agrees-eff-utahs-vpn-law-demands-technical-impossibility