Federal Court Backs EFF, Calls Utah's VPN Law a Technical Impossibility
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A federal court sided with the Electronic Frontier Foundation against Utah's so-called VPN law this week, delivering a ruling that generated 648 points and nearly 300 comments on Hacker News — the day's most discussed story. The court's conclusion, stated plainly, was that the law demands something technically impossible to implement.
Utah had passed legislation requiring VPN providers to block or filter adult content for minors, even when that content travels through an encrypted tunnel. The state's theory held that VPN companies could be made responsible for what flows through their infrastructure. The court agreed with the EFF that this is not a policy disagreement but an engineering one: inspecting encrypted traffic requires breaking the encryption, and those two things are definitionally incompatible.
What distinguishes the ruling, observers noted, is that it makes a technical finding rather than purely a constitutional one. Courts have long struggled to apply legal frameworks that predate modern networking; a judge explicitly writing that a law 'requires a technical impossibility' is a different kind of judicial action — one harder for legislators to route around than a constitutional interpretation that can shift with court composition.
Commenters with networking backgrounds pointed out that even a VPN provider willing to comply would have to perform a man-in-the-middle attack on its own users' traffic, effectively destroying the product to satisfy the law. One commenter offered a pointed analogy: 'It's like requiring envelope manufacturers to read the letters inside before delivery.' The ruling does not resolve how society should handle children's access to online content, but it firmly establishes that 'make the VPN do it' is not a legally viable answer.
A federalism dimension also loomed over the decision. Had Utah prevailed, the prospect of fifty states each enacting technically incompatible internet regulation schemes — with every VPN provider forced to navigate all of them simultaneously — would have created regulatory chaos that federal preemption, itself politically fraught, would be needed to resolve. For the EFF, the ruling reinforces a longstanding argument: technical literacy in lawmaking is not optional.