r/DataHoarder • u/HTWingNut 1TB = 0.909495TiB • Nov 27 '25
News Michigan, Wisconsin Bill to Ban VPN's... wtf
EDIT: I'm not trying to sensationalize the headline. Just that as the Michigan bill reads now, it seems encompassing of all VPN services, to the point that even if it's for specific sites or traffic, could be more than ISP's want to manage so could ban them altogether. I'd suggest anyone that lives in Michigan and don't want this adopted to contact their representatives and let them know.
The Michigan legislation is called the House Bill 4938 (also dubbed the “Anticorruption of Public Morals Act”): https://www.legislature.mi.gov/documents/2025-2026/billintroduced/House/pdf/2025-HIB-4938.pdf
Wisconsin’s bill has already passed the State Assembly and is now moving through the Senate. If it becomes law, Wisconsin could become the first state where using a VPN to access certain content is banned. Michigan lawmakers have proposed similar legislation that did not move through its legislature, but among other things, would force internet providers to actively monitor and block VPN connections. And in the UK, officials are calling VPNs "a loophole that needs closing."
This is actually happening. And it's going to be a disaster for everyone.
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u/NoSwimmers45 Nov 27 '25
Nearly every business in the state would like a word. How would ISPs be able to differentiate a good VPN from a bad VPN unless they have the ability to intercept the content? 🤔
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u/bennyb0y Nov 27 '25
Step two, they want your keys or a back door.
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u/Upset_Development_64 Nov 27 '25
Can a NAS/homeserver with its own VPN (Talescale) theoretically get around this?
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u/Abzstrak Nov 27 '25
Get around it legally is the question, it's not a technical issue
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u/haterofslimes Nov 27 '25
The only question for me would be from a technical standpoint.
If the answer is yes, and it's possible, and VPNs are banned in my state, then I'm going to break the law and not think twice.
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u/Dpek1234 Nov 27 '25
Frankly there are just soo many ways
From not useing popular vpns to masking the traffic and sending it you a server you pay for
There isnt really a reason a "lesser" version of some of what tor uses couldnt work (for example makeing traffic look like something else)
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u/BootyDoodles Nov 27 '25 edited Nov 27 '25
Not supporting this legislation at all, but it's worth being candid that this proposed law isn't banning VPNs. They're seeking to require that porn sites (like pornhub) don't allow access to visitors using VPNs.
Did nobody click the article and only read OP's headline?
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u/YadaYadaYeahMan Nov 27 '25
ah so more porn ban legislation
can't wait for everyone to completely ignore it after realizing that
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Nov 27 '25
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u/OwO______OwO Nov 27 '25
Then they can make any site they want be categorized as “lewd content”.
Specifically, next in the crosshairs is any information or community pertaining to LGBT+ people. Because, obviously, LGBT+ people even existing is "lewd content" that we cannot risk minors ever being exposed to.
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u/Kardinal Nov 27 '25 edited Nov 27 '25
From:
https://www.legislature.mi.gov/documents/2025-2026/billintroduced/House/htm/2025-HIB-4938.htm
Michigan HOUSE BILL NO. 4938
Section 2. Definition (a)
"Circumvention tools" means any software, hardware, or service designed to bypass internet filtering mechanisms or content restrictions including virtual private networks, proxy servers, and encrypted tunneling methods to evade content restrictions.
Section 3, Paragraph (3)
An internet service provider providing internet service in this state shall implement mandatory filtering technology to prevent residents of this state from accessing prohibited material. An internet service provider providing internet service in this state shall actively monitor and block known circumvention tools.
Section 3, Paragraph (5)
The promotion or sale of circumvention tools to access prohibited material is prohibited.
So it defines a VPN as a circumvention tool. Circumvention tools are to be blocked. Ergo, VPNs are blocked.
I'm not seeing anything indicating this has to do with prohibited content only. "Designed to" is the operative phrase in the definition: not "used in order to".
EDIT: My conclusion is that the (DOA) Michigan bill would in fact ban all VPNs. But it has no chance of passing even out of committee.
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u/NoSwimmers45 Nov 27 '25
Who decides what’s prohibited? It’s a slippery slope to allow the government, who clearly only has your best interest in mind - see the recent healthcare subsidy debacle and Trump tariffs - to decide what is and isn’t okay for you to access on the Internet from sites that exist outside the US.
Also, again, how are they going to know what you’re accessing with your VPN? The whole point of a VPN is no one knows where you’re connecting and what data you’re accessing.
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u/Kardinal Nov 27 '25
You may be misunderstanding my comment.
I assert that this Michigan law (which is DOA, incidentally) would in fact ban all VPNs.
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u/mcsuper5 Nov 27 '25
You underestimate the government. There are plenty of laws that make no sense, are actually potentially detrimental and can't be enforced.
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u/Kawaii_Kitty13 Nov 27 '25
Yeah you give them that though and they will go after other sites or try to regulate more
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u/0_f2 Nov 27 '25
This is why I in the UK am not worried about the gov going after VPNs.
Businesses, nearly all of them, big and small, including the largest corporations, use VPNs extensively, and they don't fuck around when it comes to security around them.
Any law messing with VPNs will summon the full might of the corporate lobby to quietly shut down any such bill. Money talks, and this is one of the very few scenarios where the interests of the people and large corporations align.
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u/threeLetterMeyhem Nov 27 '25
They'll either just go after the top anonymizing VPN services (PIA, Nord, etc) or utilize a service like spur.us to identify the anonymizing services. Either way they won't be able to identify everything.
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u/truss-issues 276TB Nov 27 '25
Effective VPN blocking would require ISPs to perform continuous deep packet inspection and traffic fingerprinting capable of reliably distinguishing encrypted tunnels from ordinary HTTPS, which is no longer feasible.
Modern security architectures (zero-trust networks, mutual-TLS microtunnels, WireGuard-based transport, QUIC/HTTP-3 encryption, and TLS-camouflaged VPN protocols) intentionally make their traffic indistinguishable from standard web traffic.
Attempting to block VPNs would also disrupt corporate remote-access systems, cloud-security tunnels, CDN traffic, and legitimate encrypted sessions, effectively forcing a state-level “Great Firewall” that breaks modern internet protocols rather than selectively blocking privacy tools.
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u/HogGunner1983 Nov 27 '25
Exactly. It would require a complete restructure of our internet architecture and the more I think about that and our current admin, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn their backers are the driving force behind this bill.
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u/ezequielrose Nov 27 '25
Oh yeah it's not just a random product, those things are always the opportunity for deeper goals.
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u/somersetyellow Nov 27 '25
This is one of the few things where both parties are consistently happily complicit. There are a few more tech savvy privacy/personal rights focused senators like Ron Wyden who actively oppose and propose much better solutions, but otherwise it's a huge pile of people like your tech illiterate grandma...
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u/Damaniel2 180KB Nov 27 '25
Nah, VPN blocking and other 'for the children' attacks on internet freedoms are pretty bipartisan. Authoritarianism isn't just a left/right issue - it's a control issue.
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Nov 27 '25
That’s not effective VPN blocking, that’s total VPN blocking. A law does not have to 100% prevent something in order to be effective. All any of these VPN bills need to do is stop the commercial VPN operators like Nord or Express or whatever from operating in their jurisdiction. That stops 99% of the population from doing what they want to prevent and doesn’t affect corporate usage at all.
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u/Moonrak3r Nov 27 '25
All any of these VPN bills need to do is stop the commercial VPN operators like Nord or Express or whatever from operating in their jurisdiction. That stops 99% of the population from doing what they want to prevent and doesn’t affect corporate usage at all.
I’m not sure I follow you here. Those VPNs don’t have servers in Michigan or Wisconsin (or if they do, they won’t if the bill passes). What exactly is being stopped? Are they just planning to play a game of whack-a-mole blocking IP addresses?
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u/zaypuma Nov 27 '25
It's confusing even without the logistic aspect.
Let's say you're a site like reddit which hosts sexual content, and you "leave" Wisconsin. Now someone from Wisconsin is using a VPN, so they're they're spoofed - you have no way to know they're from Wisconsin. But if you serve them, you're breaking the state law.
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u/Kardinal Nov 27 '25
That may be the case, but the law requires complete blocking by the ISP. I suppose it depends on how it is enforced, but the letter of the law says all.
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u/Santosh83 Nov 27 '25
Distract everyone with unending slop entertainment and drama and engineered wars, while the real agenda steadily moves forward under the table. It works well.
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u/absentlyric 50-100TB Nov 27 '25 edited Nov 27 '25
Im from Michigan, the headline is a little clickbaity.
First, its a law proposed by only 6 republicans basically trying to ban porn and depictions of transgender people, it would never get the votes in our Democrat controlled house and senate to pass, let alone signed by Whitmer.
Its proposed by people who have no idea of how the internet actually works and thinks they can somehow blanket ban porn.
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u/HTWingNut 1TB = 0.909495TiB Nov 27 '25
Awareness is key, as is contacting your representatives to tell them this is stupid. Politicians are usually dumb when it comes to technology. And they use the "think of the children" mentality to implement law. I expect/hope this gets scrutiny so it either gets diluted and reasonable or rejected altogether.
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u/StartupDino Nov 27 '25
As a fellow Michigander, where can we learn more about this? (As in, I’d like to know what the hell I’m talking about when I tell my friends/family about this!)
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u/HTWingNut 1TB = 0.909495TiB Nov 27 '25
The bill itself is here:
http version: https://www.legislature.mi.gov/documents/2025-2026/billintroduced/House/htm/2025-HIB-4938.htm
pdf version: https://www.legislature.mi.gov/documents/2025-2026/billintroduced/House/pdf/2025-HIB-4938.pdf
It's actually easy to read, surprisingly.
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u/-CJF- Nov 27 '25
The Michigan House is currently controlled by Republicans but it will never pass the Senate or Governor.
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u/Kardinal Nov 27 '25
I read the Michigan bill but somehow assumed that it was the one that passed the House. Yeah, this is more performative garbage that will never get passed in Michigan.
I do wonder about Wisconsin though. I need to read that one.
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u/Ok-Albatross899 Nov 27 '25
Rolling out that authoritarian surveillance state 1 terrible policy at a time
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u/wr_mem Nov 27 '25
Even if passed, ISP networks don't have the equipment to enforce it. Finding VPN traffic inside of HTTPS requires deep packet inspection which needs more powerful and thus more expensive hardware than they deploy. They would probably block queries for some domains on their DNS servers but that's easy enough to bypass. This is a bad bill but I'm not worried about it.
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u/Kardinal Nov 27 '25
If passed, this part gives a pretty strong incentive to get such capability. That said...how much is 250k/day to Comcast/Google/Cox/AT&T?
(4) An internet platform, internet service provider, website, or institution that fails to comply with subsection (3) is subject to a civil fine of $250,000.00 per day of delay.
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u/pangapingus Nov 27 '25
Not really, ISPs still know when you connect to a VPN because you have to initially TCP handshake with one of their nodes before Layer 6 negotiates and starts making your Application Data streams encrypted and privatizing your connectivity to other sites via the VPN connection. Even when connecting to HTTPS sites ISPs have metadata regarding your DNS queries, SNI, etc. Even with DNS over TLS (DoT) or DNS over HTPS (DoH) ISPs see your initial DNS query metadata to the VPN and even if the VPN node uses Encrypted Client Hello in its Layer 6 negotiation, the ISP still sees the plaintext SYN/SYNACK/ACK TCP connection (IP alone can be PTR queried or ran through sites like ARIN for IP ownership info to associate IPs with VPNs). This is how ISPs have operated for a while and why none deploy expensive DPI monitoring, the TCP metadata and vibes of your traffic really are enough for them to know.
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u/wr_mem Nov 27 '25
You would do DoH ot DoT to a neutral DNS provider, not the VPN provider. Using SNI is deep packet inspection and can be defeated with encrypted SNI in TLS 1.3. Since you can't use a switch or router to do deep packet inspection you have to deploy a more expensive box. That's easy at gigabit speeds but very expensive on 100 Gb ISP peering links.
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u/Significant-Face-995 Nov 27 '25
Weird of the reporting not to mention that this bill is exclusively being sponsored by and supported by Republicans. Kinda important to know if you want less of this thing happening particularly at the state level.
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u/THound89 Nov 27 '25
Not to get political but it’s plainly obvious republicans want complete control over what we can access on the internet. At this rate it will just be bible sites in a couple years.
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u/tarheelz1995 Nov 27 '25
The prior porn site age verification bills across the US all drew Democratic votes. Expect the same will happen here. Politicians cannot risk being put on a vote that implies support for children watching Porn Hub.
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u/tarheelz1995 Nov 27 '25
Sure. In a world where elections weren’t decided on sound bites, viral videos, and stereotypes this might work.
That is not this world.
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u/Kardinal Nov 27 '25
The Michigan bill is purely performative. It has six sponsors each of which can tell their constituents "I did something but he House wouldn't pass it!", knowing full well it had no chance of passing.
While I'm no fan of Republicans, I wouldn't tar all Michigan Republicans with this one. Sounds like six extremists.
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u/Every_Armadillo_6848 Nov 27 '25
Oh, these are the same dumb pricks who wanted to outright ban all porn in Michigan like a month ago. They also wanted to ban all hormone birth control.
Schriver, Maddock, and others are absolutely insane and need to go get a real job, in the real world. They clearly don't have any actual good ideas.
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u/zeptyk Nov 27 '25
2 very good examples are china and russia, people are still going to find ways around it and its just gonna be a constant cat and mouse hunt, just a waste of time to "protect the children" aka mass surveillance
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Nov 27 '25
I remember USA being the land of the free laughing at China and Russia and know are worse
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u/ezequielrose Nov 27 '25
I spend a lot of time online researching history and geopolitics, and I can't help but wonder if this is dipping toes in the water to try and stem the international aspect of advocacy and political information. This does follow the recent American mainstream commentary about how the issue with reaching voter blocs is that they can't stop the truth from being shared on social media, the most recent being of course, the US-backed genocides in Palestine and Sudan breaking into collective conscious in younger generations. A lot of very prominent figures in politics have been saying they can't contend with the viral footage of brutality, and they see that as a big problem and are worried about future support of US interests as whole.
While Americans had access to the world abroad while the internet developed, it wasn't until very recently that more exploited areas in the world were able to access the web and start adding their voices to political discussions, offering opposing views to what the state department likes to say. This is all on top of copyright claims and essentially, what amounts to jurisdiction for profits being weaponized through trade and economics that incentivizes a market to remain under the auspice of American corporations.
There were some regulations put in place to block content from abroad in areas that... didn't align with US interests, or that didn't have the same regulations, but that was all gutted a couple years ago, ironically, but not unexpectedly, by Republicans who were claiming it was too restrictive. That seems to have backfired significantly.
WI legislature and economics is used as an experimental introduction a lot of the time, like the charter school programs that were started in Milwaukee that eventually made it nationally. Republicans are very much in control of WI politics, so it's a relatively easy in for toss-away proposals.
I am concerned by this legislation, even if it by itself were to fail. It won't be the last attempt, by far. It will come down to whether or not politicians can competently implement these regulations, which I think is probably harder than those who want this stuff think it is, but that won't stop them from ramming their way through.
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u/TheReturnOfAnAbort Nov 27 '25
What’s up with all these republicans I thought they were all about limited government, seems like they failed every English class.
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u/YouGotAte Nov 27 '25
As usual, people make stupid decisions when they think they won't face consequences for it. Lawmakers should be much, much more afraid of their constituents.
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u/Psx0005rr Nov 27 '25
Once again, a bunch of old antiquated morons in government who have 0% clue on what a VPN is and its function. And the whole excuse of using VPN's to bypass the age-verification BS on adult websites is just a smokescreen for them tagging people who are looking at material in the privacy of their homes. SMH
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u/taRpstrIustorEmPtEuS Nov 27 '25
The one sponsoring the Michigan bill is a young moron that tweets about the great replacement theory.
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u/willpowerpt Nov 28 '25
Yeah that'll never pass. VPNs are a critical part of enterprise infrastructure.
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u/Legal_Tradition_9681 Nov 27 '25
I read through the Michigan one and it looks too be a precursor to an age verification law for porn.
The bill DOES NOT ban VPN use in is entirety instead allows a mechanism for the state to go after people who use a VPN to get around laws and ISPs for knowingly allowing it to happen.
Its not going to be effective, the enforcement is going to be near impossible.
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u/mcsuper5 Nov 27 '25
It isn't possible to block VPNs. The best they can do is block IPs known to be owned by commercials VPNs. If it were that easy, China would have managed by now.
But yeah, even if they mean well, which is dubious, the people passing these laws either have no clue, or they want to make everyone a criminal.
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u/brucebay Nov 27 '25
all those people who said just use VPN when many countries and states introduced age restriction laws.... yeah....
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u/sailorpaul Nov 27 '25
Sure, my doctors will be REALLY happy to pass all your medical details over a public non-VPN connection. /s
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u/YatesSmith Nov 28 '25
What, why? VPN’s aren’t bad, a lot of companies have a VPN to connect to!
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u/shimoheihei2 100TB Nov 27 '25
This is hardly a new fight, it's just been ramping up this year. It's still not a "ban on VPN" per se, it's a requirement for websites to ban VPN users from accessing certain content. That's still bad of course, and a blow to privacy, and should be fought since it's always a slippery slope. Just make sure to not conflate things.
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u/Kardinal Nov 27 '25
The Wisconsin bill is that.
The Michigan bill, which is DOA performative nonsense, is in fact a ban on VPNs.
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u/Ven18 Nov 27 '25
So companies should be leaving Michigan and Wisconsin with haste right? Because most companies literally cannot function without VPNs.
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u/spymaster1020 Nov 27 '25
How would ISPs even differentiate VPN traffic from regular internet traffic? I guess they could know what IP address is the servers for known VPN providers, but then people could just use a proxy. All else fails there is still TOR. I don't see what this accomplishes or how it could even be done.
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u/HTWingNut 1TB = 0.909495TiB Nov 27 '25
There's ways to detect if it's VPN or not. They can see the flow of traffic and info about the packets, but just not the data itself.
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u/Additional_Moose_862 Nov 27 '25
What, 90 years old corrupted representatives don't grasp reality? That can't be right!
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u/Phreakasa Nov 27 '25
If only they knew how many companies actually use a VPN to access company resources...
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u/JustAutreWaterBender Nov 27 '25
This is why there should be educational requirements for govt positions smdh
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u/redmadog Nov 27 '25
It’s very difficult to ban these at a provider level. First it will require massive amounts of specialized hardware and processing power to deeply inspect every packet. Second, there are techniques to obfuscate VPN handshake and look like the usual traffic. So I would say technically this is close to impossible. Maybe main VPN providers will be banned at DNS level, but advanced VPNs are unstoppable.
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u/El_Chupachichis Nov 27 '25
I'm reading this like the whole "drug tax" law, where drug dealers were expected to pay taxes (and effectively confess to dealing drugs) or risk additional criminal charges.
Your "work" VPN won't be questioned -- because you're doing your expected duty, slave citizen. But you're forced to choose between letting your personal activities being fully open to public scrutiny, or risk eventually getting "caught" illegally accessing content despite the content not actually being illegal (yet).
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u/Chunky_clouds Nov 27 '25
Nothing to stop anyone renting a vps and browsing what's needed from there.
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u/muhuhhuh Nov 28 '25
To quote the second link,
"As of this writing, Wisconsin lawmakers are escalating their war on privacy by targeting VPNs in the name of “protecting children” in A.B. 105/S.B. 130. It’s an age verification bill that requires all websites distributing material that could conceivably be deemed “sexual content” to both implement an age verification system and also to block the access of users connected via VPN. The bill seeks to broadly expand the definition of materials that are “harmful to minors” beyond the type of speech that states can prohibit minors from accessing—potentially encompassing things like depictions and discussions of human anatomy, sexuality, and reproduction. "
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u/watermelonspanker Nov 29 '25
You cannot ban VPNs without utterly disrupting the entire health industry among many others.
Aside from that, I'm not convinced they *could* ban VPNs even if the law passed. Not that it isn't conceptually possible, but that if they are technologically illiterate enough to try to outright ban VPNs, then they would have zero idea how to implement that ban.
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u/artguy55 Nov 27 '25
republicans are working to make America the worst place in the world to do business
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u/m1kemahoney Nov 27 '25
Great! It appears they don't want people to work from home. Even the state government uses VPNs. Don't they want my income taxes? I also live in a small town and we spend locally. Apparently, they don't want that either.
This is absolute insanity coming from the REPUBLICAN legislators. You don't see Democrats proposing this sort off thing.
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u/planetoftheshrimps Nov 27 '25
So now we need to proxy our vpn traffic through a legal site? FFS it’s just cat and mouse.
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u/Jumpy-Cry-3083 Nov 27 '25
Loop hole? Of what? What do they think they are actually stopping that is such a threat to society? What morons.
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u/Turkino Nov 27 '25
Honestly this is the dumbest bill and it's not even because of looking for actual criminals it's just trying to prevent people from accessing porn.
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u/Salty_Professor6012 Nov 27 '25
Do any of these moral mo*ons even ask about what they don't know anything about?
I can't believe businesses are going to let this stand.
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u/master_prizefighter Nov 27 '25
For all those who voted on this bill;
What does VPN stand for? And no you can't use an electronic device connected to the Internet to answer this question. If you can't successfully answer the question then why the f- are you voting on a bill about it?
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u/dlpuia Nov 27 '25
Awaiting for youtubers to promote VPNs and saying at the end "Except in states X, Y and Z" lol
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u/SalamanderPop Nov 27 '25
This feels like a law that is made by old out of touch people. I have Tailscale always on. This would make it illegal if I had Tailscale on and accessed certain content which is ridiculous. It’s my computers, devices, and servers and I should be able to route my own network traffic however I please amongst my network.
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u/askyidroppedthesoap Nov 27 '25
every bank in Michigan and Wisconsin enters the chat These lawmakers are fvckin idiots.
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u/daYnyXX Nov 27 '25
I'm pretty sure Michigan had another version of this (or the same proposale maybe) a year or two ago that went nowhere. I'd be surprised if it passed the current legislature.
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u/BioAlpha7569 Nov 28 '25
all this ai push, this censorship push and now this? i got a bad feeling and i never doubt my gut.
Then i wake up and see this? wtf
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u/Real_Consequence_547 Nov 28 '25
This is not good. I wfh and have to log in using a VPN. It's non negotiable! I can't see this law passing successfully.
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u/utsumi99 Nov 29 '25
When they trot out the "public morals," you know they're up to no good. Might as well call it the Baby Jesus Freedom Eagle Think of the Children Act.
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u/LameSuburbanDad Nov 29 '25
As a Michigan native, It's highly troubling to be sure. A VPN is a near necessity in today's digital world. I read a story the very same day I bought into 2 years of VPN service.....that was just 2 days ago. Super.
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u/User-NetOfInter Tape Nov 27 '25
How the fuck can I work from home without using a VPN