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If the government really wanted to protect children from the internet they'd provide locked down devices with spyware to each kid or they'd force parents to buy locked down devices. They'd punish parents if a child used a device that isn't locked down. If they actually cared about protecting children they'd monitor their parents with spyware too. You can't really protect children from every single thing that could happen otherwise.

There's already several of them. You can even run things like cjdns which is entirely encrypted and p2p routed.

It could be argued that this is a violation of the interstate commerce clause of the constitution.

California isn't forcing Glock to do anything. Glock wants the central valley and orange county market so they do what they need to do.

(I actually have no idea about the specifics of this, but I'm assuming it falls in the general shape of California trying to restrict access to murder tools and the murder tool vendor responding by finding ways around the law rather than just admitting their hobby and business kills people)

The US can prohibit VPNs and encryption all it wants, doesn't meant he rat of the world will

By the same logic social issues would be distributed to the states, civil rights. Which is what's happening now. The interstate commerce act is a stroke of brilliance tbh, it allows the states to work as a greater system without there being a patchwork of laws and regulations. I don't think dropping it would be wise just because we've reached this level of stupidity... time to suffer consequences.

That's what they want so they can clamp all the way down and death star us into submission

This is just step one of them trying to absolutely ban VPNs.

A website can't determine VPN use very effectively, won't be long until they "need the governments help" for compliance.

Edited to add: they aren't going to ban business VPNs people use your critical thinking skills here.

China outlaws VPN use and has an exemption for businesses. It would be easy to follow the same guidelines anywhere else.

lol. Good luck catching random VPSes running a wireguard server container.

I read tfa and banning use of VPNs is, in fact, a possibility to be compliant. Because how exactly do you determine a visitor to Pornhub is actually a VPN user from Wisconsin? The website can't, presumably, trace the user's location (defeating the entire purpose of the VPN), so that leaves VPN providers as the next responsible party.

Once it happens there they will start copying it to every state they can.

another form of connectivity that doesn’t rely on national infrastructure. I have no idea what that is

l can tell you.
It's the internet in its original form. A distributed network of independent nodes freely peering to each other over a decentralized infrastructure.

First to go was the decentralization.
Main knots like DE-CIX are now the central connection points and single point of failure (and intrusion).

Next went the independent distribution with hyperscalers taking over.

Currently the free peering is about to disappear.
E.g. my provider, a major one here in Germany, just announced to completely remove from free public peering and let a private company handle it for him instead.
This company then charges other peers based on bandwidth.

The problem of looming governmental restrictions is just the tip of the iceberg.
The internet is already rotten from the infrastructural core and there is no easy way around that...

https://meshtastic.org/

“An open source, off-grid, decentralized, mesh network built to run on affordable, low-power devices”. “Meshtastic® is a project that enables you to use inexpensive LoRa radios as a long range off-grid communication platform in areas without existing or reliable communications infrastructure. This project is 100% community driven and open source!”

I tried to invent a similar concept before finding out that there are already several implementations 😅

They can’t control everything if they don’t know who or where we are.

I feel like a lot of my European (EU citizen) friends are commentating from some high horse but in reality I feel European lawmakers are just watching how this plays out before deciding to follow suit.

A bad time to be alive really...

The moment billionaires coopted the internet was when it went downhill. They knew the threat it posed, the vision of the early cypherpunks, and made sure the internet wouldn't do that to their power.

Decentralization and accessibility are good things. Elitism and exclusionary practices do nothing good.

If you throw money at the problem, you’d still have a VPN.

Heavily depends on what "outlawed" means.
I am certainly capable of implementing low cost workarounds to purely technical anti-VPN-measures, but certainly would not risk going to jail just for trying it.

Essentially boils down to the old saying:
"If privacy is outlawed, only outlaws will have privacy."