Posted on 10/20/2025 7:44:46 AM PDT by PittsburghAfterDark
On Sept. 11, Michigan representatives proposed an internet content ban bill unlike any of the others we've seen: This particularly far-reaching legislation would ban not only many types of online content, but also the ability to legally use any VPN.
The bill, called the Anticorruption of Public Morals Act and advanced by six Republican representatives, would ban a wide variety of adult content online, ranging from ASMR and adult manga to AI content and any depiction of transgender people. It also seeks to ban all use of VPNs, foreign or US-produced.
VPNs (virtual private networks) are suites of software often used as workarounds to avoid similar bans that have passed in states like Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, as well as the UK. They can be purchased with subscriptions or downloaded, and are built into some browsers and Wi-Fi routers as well.
But Michigan's bill would charge internet service providers with detecting and blocking VPN use, as well as banning the sale of VPNs in the state. Associated fines would be up to $500,000.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnet.com ...
“Pornography is the scourge of the West. It is singularly responsible for the breakdown of family and morality. It needs to be banished from our homes as it was banished from 42nd Street in Manhattan.”
If you say so, Girolamo.
When people aren’t educated enough to know the difference between THEN and THAN, it does get irritating.
I do say so.
What an amazing quantity of bad ideas all rolled into one. Work from home can’t exist without VPN. Also multi-site businesses are made much easier that way. And of course all the security guys say we should always VPN for security. And really, how are you going to stop us. These guys are more obsessed with porn than the worst porn addicts, and apparently will to demand their whole state roll back to 1980s technology to deal with it.
Absolutely unenforceable and most of it is a 1st Amendment violation. It's like saying "No brown paper wrapping on packages," and just as stupid.
I've setup many of my own VPNs running on servers I lease. You could just have a "VPN" club and a bunch of people doing the same, even if commercial vendors stop selling in MI.
The welfare state is responsible for the breakdown of the family, not porn. Once the government made it financially advantageous to have children out of wedlock marriage was disincentivized.
Obviously, we need better paper control laws.
Regards,
Making VPNs illegal would be like making it illegal to close your window blinds.
Whoa, this idea needs to die a quick death.
VPNs are also a blessing for people on limited incomes who can’t pay for cable or premium content, but use torrent services to solve that. Take that away and those people are returned to the Big Four main networks’ programming and their non-stop liberal agenda grind.
There’s also the data harvesting problem and what constitutes the bounds of privacy. Verizon recently admitted sharing their customer info with the Biden regime. The cable companies know everything their customers watch and share that data with marketing services just like Microsoft and most search engines do.
Virtual Private Networks move the information that singles you out to various servers around the world, restoring anonymity and removing you from the marketing/surveillance assembly line. What the Michigan bill proposes is like gun registration, except applied to citizens’ online activities and media consumption.
I use VPN to get information from other nations. I think it shouldn’t be passed, because it seems UNCONSTITUNIONAL!!
“They don’t give one damn about the adult part...they are after the VPN.”
I concur. If homes and businesses cannot secure their LAN(s) from the Wild Wonky Web then one solution is the encrypt EVERY SINGLE DOCUMENT YOU CREATE. A bigger P.I.T.A. I cannot imagine ...
What is “Adult Content”? Opposing Politics? Alternative Health? Religion? It will not be limited to just Porn. It will be anything they say might harm children.
They may be “Republicans” and may be using the pretext of going after bad morals in online content, but they are not Conservatives and actually big brother types offering “security” at the price of Liberty.
Have I mentioned the “dead internet theory” lately?
Porn. That’s all. Not the other stuff. It clearly exists and is accessible to children since the rise of the internet. It’s a serious, long-overdue problem that needs to be addressed.
“Porn. That’s all. Not the other stuff.”
Unfortunately that is not how it works. That is why they did not use just “pornography” as legal wording. They used “Adult Content” which is a huge wide brush that can be edited as they like when they like to mean anything they like.
This gets passed, and we are going to be sacrificing a whole lot of free speech and liberty deemed as “Adult Content”. Aside from the fact this would literally destroy the internet.
Is losing the whole internet altogether worth it? Are you willing to sacrifice it all for the one issue?
It is like cutting off your own head to cure a brain tumor.
Except this won’t address it. As always these kinds of things punish the white market and encourage the black market. Pornhub, and other legal places, really actively do not want kids hitting the site (or being in the content), that’s bad for business. And they do everything logistically possible to keep them off (which, unfortunately, it’s the internet, you can’t prove who is connecting to what). The illegal sites, running off server farms in international waters and countries that don’t have laws, and unconcerned with the age of the viewer or participant, won’t be effected by this all. So the legal sites become harder for over 18 people to access, and the illegal sites thrive. And now they’re going after VPN, a perfectly legitimate tool that has massive perfectly legal 100% non-porn related uses that a lot of business rely on for productivity and revenue, just makes it all dumber.
BOSTON, JUNE 30, 1998 -- MCI today introduced networkMCI Enterprise Blue, the first comprehensive suite of premier services designed for customers with mainframe computers who are looking to modernize their "legacy" networks with Web-enabled applications."Many large corporations today would like to protect their mainframe investments but at the same time would like to take advantage of Web-enabled applications on the Internet," explained Stephen Von Rump, MCI vice president of Enterprise Services. "With networkMCI Enterprise Blue they will be able to transform their enterprise networks from the legacy era into the Internet-driven multimedia future.
"In creating this suite of services, we have joined forces with Cisco Systems and have enlisted the support of MCI Systemhouse and IBM," said Von Rump. "Working together, we have built the most comprehensive offering available that addresses System Network Architecture (SNA) migration, from transport to application enablement. We developed this new offering by leveraging the experience we gained in migrating one of the largest SNA networks ever -- MCI's own. We created a new type of network in the process - an SNA VPN."
"The corporate network has become the lifeblood of the enterprise," said John Gerdelman, president of networkMCI Services, the network and information technologies arm of MCI. "SNA VPN migration is a significant step in creating powerful, flexible networks cost-effectively, while considerably enhancing corporate efficiency, increasing competitiveness, and improving profitability. These new networks will actually help companies define their future offerings through the use of information centered networks."
" The market for this type of service is in the billions," said Tom Nolle, president of CIMI Corporation-a major consultant firm based in New Jersey. "Many large corporations want to modernize their legacy era networks, but have been reluctant to do so because of uncertainties associated with reliability and quality assurance. MCI's new service is notable and worth looking at, and many companies will benefit from the types of services and support MCI has to offer."networkMCI Enterprise Blue consists of three complementary product suites: application enablement solutions, VPN solutions and transport solutions. Customers will be able to pick and choose which best suits their own specific requirements.
Back in 1998, our small conference room at the MCI Regional Junction and Switching Center, giant letters were velcroed to the wall, "networkMCI." One day we all went into the conference room for a meeting and it said "wetnorkMCI." That was team building.
1980s technology like 1-900-sex-talk.
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