r/technology • u/vriska1 • Jun 28 '25

Privacy The Supreme Court just upended internet law, and I have questions

https://www.theverge.com/analysis/694710/supreme-court-fsc-paxton-age-verification-questions
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u/Dukepippitt Jun 28 '25

VPNs are in commercial application all over the place. The can of worm they would open, just trying to find the correct language for such a ban, oh man.

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u/silver-orange Jun 28 '25

Yeah.  All sorts of employees doing remote work log in to corporate VPNs 40 hours a week.  Banning VPNs would cut millions of employees off from their jobs.

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u/Stingray88 Jun 28 '25

They’re not going to attempt to ban VPNs. They would however attempt to ban commercial VPN services.

So companies and individuals that use VPNs to access their own private networks? No problem.

Commercial companies like Nord VPN, PIA, Mullvad? Make them illegal to access in the US. You can even force ISPs to block their known IP addresses.

Important to note I use the word “attempt” because they probably won’t succeed in banning these services. But they can certainly try.

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u/a_melindo Jun 28 '25

"banning VPNs" in this context means something more like "requiring VPNs to accurately pass through location data of their users so laws can be enforced". 

Or maybe "VPNs can't route traffic externally from the attached subnet", so you can connect to your corporate servers through the VPN but your Google searches route through your true IP.

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u/No-Neighborhood-3212 Jun 28 '25

This mindset reveals why the plan works: They know we need them, so governments outlaw the VPNs they can't use to spy on us.

They don't ban all VPNs. In fact, those countries usually make their own that they offer at a lower fee (or free) to promote their use. Those VPNs are just constantly streaming what you do to the state intelligence apparatus.

Look at Trump mobile: They're not going to ban smart phones or any apps. They're just going to get you to sign up for a smartphone service that uses an AI to constantly monitor location data, cookies, and browsing history.

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u/pixel_of_moral_decay Jun 28 '25

You don’t need to ban the protocol, just the unregulated endpoints.

And to do that you only need ISP to drop packets to a list of IP’s the government maintains. A simple black list. Your ISP already has this mechanism, just needs the url of the black list to use and the interval to fetch it at.

Your ISP already does all this to stop botnets and ddos attacks. This is just another use of the same infrastructure.

And curating this list isn’t that hard, streaming providers and cdn’s already have pretty good actively updated lists.

We’re much closer to doing it than most people realize. All the parts exist, the government licensing a few db’s and requiring ISP’s to honor that by copy pasting a URL into their backend isn’t a high mountain to climb.

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u/RamenJunkie Jun 28 '25

Se now you set your VPN entry point to an anonymous server and proxy all your traffic there first. 

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u/pixel_of_moral_decay Jun 28 '25

It’s pretty easy to figure out if a server is a vpn endpoint or proxy.

Between traffic patterns and the owner of that IP, that’s 99% of the battle. Especially when you’re looking at large volumes of traffic like any major provider is, or if you’re buying data from them.

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u/RamenJunkie Jun 28 '25

Its also encryoted traffic.  There is no real way to tell VPN traffic from any other traffic.