Utah tells porn sites to take the P out of VPNs, and it's their fault they can't
Utah has enacted a law requiring pornographic websites to implement age verification for users, regardless of whether they are using VPNs. This legislation raises concerns about the practicality of enforcing such regulations, as VPNs are designed to mask users' locations. The situation highlights the challenges governments face in controlling internet access and user privacy.
- ▪Utah's new law mandates age verification for porn sites accessed by users in the state.
- ▪The law requires compliance from websites regardless of users' VPN usage.
- ▪Governments globally are struggling to regulate VPNs effectively due to their inherent design to bypass geolocation.
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Record
| Original publisher | theregister |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theregister.com/columnists/2026/05/18/utah-tells-porn-sites-to-take-the-p-out-of-vpns-and-its-their-fault-that-they-cant/5240978 |
| Publication time | Thu, 28 May 2026 23:10:23 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-28T23:29:38.979Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-28T23:29:38.979Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 0ZS3EHNwu6VQ |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
(function() { let windowUrl = window.location.href; windowUrl = windowUrl.substring(windowUrl.indexOf('?') + 1); let messageElement = document.querySelector('.shareableMessage'); if (windowUrl && windowUrl.includes('code') && windowUrl.includes('expires')) { messageElement.style.display = 'block'; } })(); Columnists Utah tells porn sites to take the P out of VPNs, and it's their fault that they can't Governments can't touch VPNs technically or commercially. The mess they'll make if they try will be off the scale Rupert Goodwins Rupert Goodwins Register columnist Published mon 18 May 2026 // 09:30 UTC OPINION The terms "blindingly obvious," "logical consequence," and "that is not how it works" appear nowhere in the government handbook of internet legislation.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at theregister.