Utah’s Senate Bill 73 (SB 73), the Online Age Verification Amendments, takes effect Wednesday, May 6, making the state the first in the nation to hold websites legally liable for verifying users who mask their location through a virtual private network (VPN).
Utah has a new law about VPNs and age checks for adult websites that starts next week.
The law called Senate Bill 73 requires websites with adult content to check the age of people in Utah before they can see it using simple checks like ID cards
Using a VPN or any tool to… pic.twitter.com/ZHAfz12w21
— Pirat_Nation 🔴 (@Pirat_Nation) May 2, 2026
Governor Spencer Cox signed the bill on March 19. The law’s VPN provisions operate in two ways: it classifies any person physically located in Utah as a Utah-based user, regardless of VPN use, and bars websites hosting material harmful to minors from providing VPN instructions to users.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a digital rights nonprofit, warned the framework creates a “liability trap.” “If a website cannot reliably detect a VPN user’s true location and the law requires it to do so for all users in a particular state, then the legal risk could push the site to either ban all known VPN IPs, or to mandate age verification for every visitor globally,” the EFF stated. NordVPN first flagged the issue in March, calling the law “technically unenforceable” and noting that VPN providers continuously add new IP addresses, making any blocklist incomplete.
The law’s implications extend beyond adult content platforms. Hill Air Force Base, one of the largest Air Force installations in the country by workforce, employs more than 26,000 military and civilian personnel 25 miles north of Salt Lake City. U.S. military operational security (OPSEC) doctrine explicitly instructs service members to use VPNs on personal devices when connecting to outside networks, a direct conflict with SB 73’s liability structure.
The Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) filed a federal lawsuit in February challenging a separate Utah age-verification law, the App Store Accountability Act, on First Amendment grounds.
A 2% tax on revenues from adult content websites, also included in SB 73, takes effect October 1.
