this post was submitted on 03 May 2026
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Could they not also just selectively ban all Utah-based IPs?
People in Utah could still access with a VPN, but never would, because that would be against the law.
Why is a company or person that doesn’t exist physically in Utah at all responsible for adhering to Utah’s laws? Should be their government’s responsibility to block sites, not the site’s responsibility to block Utah.
Jurisdiction follows impact, not geography. If a service 'does business with' Utah residents then Utah has legal standing to regulate that interaction.
If someone comes from Utah to my state and then I break one of Utah's laws against them, does that mean I'm subject to Utah's laws? They aren't doing business in Utah. People in Utah are doing business with them.
I don't have any way to prevent access to my site based on what laws you're subject to. Nor do I have any desire to learn 52 states worth of individual laws that may or may not apply to me. I didn't wire your computer up to the internet, you did that.
In the law, those are mutually exclusive. If either end of the transaction is in Utah, it is under Utah jurisdiction.
If you're hosting an online business you do have the ability to block users based on location.
I would advise not running an online business then, because the law around jurisdiction and the Internet is well settled.
Geofencing is not trivial, cheap, or even reliable. Are there any cases of sites being legally required to geofence or do they all do it to preemptively avoid legal issues? I've only ever seen the latter.
I'm not trying to argue what is or isn't the current state of law around this; I'm pointing out the absurdity of enforcing it this way and the strange way it's being used to backdoor state laws into federal ones. This is extremely stupid from a technical, and legislative standpoint.
I agree that it is absurd.
The goal here is to force sites to do age verification.
Creating absurd laws where the only possible way to not be held liable is to implement the age verification requirements regardless of the apparent source of the traffic is the tactic that they've chosen.