It’d be interesting to see how they word such a law given that many companies use them to secure access to their systems.
Every attempt to legislate tech ever.
I was wondering that very same thing!
Maybe the legislation in question will give your enterprise a pass if you can demonstrate that your employees won’t be able to access any of that naughty NSF content from either the workplace or company-supplied gear.
My eyes have rolled so far back in my head I can see behind me.
From the linked article:
Wisconsin’s bill defines “harmful to minors” much more broadly. It applies to materials that merely describe sex or feature descriptions/depictions of human anatomy. This definition would likely encompass a wide range of literature, music, television, and films that are protected under the First Amendment for both adults and young people, not to mention basic scientific and medical content.
Or a decent chunk of the art on display in museums, one might add.
Note to legislators: your attempt to regulate away bawdiness will fail, one way or another. Work-arounds will emerge about five minutes after your bill passes. We humans have been festooning our spaces with, ahem, erotic imagery for millennia, and that includes Stone Age cave paintings, sculptures, and petroglyphs.
I haven’t read the Wisconsin bill, but a group of six Michigan house members have crafted a bill (The Anticorruption of Public Morals Act) that explicitly bans the online distribution of pornography (to anyone, not just minors) as well as the “circumvention tools” that might be used to get around the ban. Excluded from “prohibited material” is 1) “Material to be used for scientific and medical research or instruction” and 2) “Peer-reviewed academic content.” Were this bill to pass (and I’m guessing it’s going nowhere), I suspect we’d see the birth of a whole new industry producing spicy “peer-reviewed academic content.”
The Bill’s enumeration things that would be considered “prohibited material” is quite detailed and extensive—it suggests the lawmakers have really done their research. 
“US Lawmakers want to ban VPNs”.
Fixed that for you.
If you really wanted to fix it, you would have written, “Some Wisconsin Lawmakers …”
I’d settle for every US-centric story about internet tech — a global business — mentioning when something is US-centric.
I concur. But this wasn’t US centric. It was Wisconsin centric. I suppose it is what happens when you head is made of cheese …
I’ll try to remember that the next time I post about domestic stupidity . 
I’m more than happy to put Wisconsin in that headline, but the problem today is so pervasive, that I’m just aiming for the small win first.
If you don’t live in Wisconsin and you read that story only to think “Oh, it doesn’t affect me”… well, welcome to the life of tech-heads in the 95%+ of the world population that isn’t in the U S of A.
I don’t live in Wisconsin, but I realize that that story does affect me.
Just like the idiots in the EU with their over reach affects me. And the British with the laws that can not be spoken of affects me. And the heavy handed politicians in India with their must deploy apps affects me.
And as much as you may believe it, they all affect you as well. And they affect 100% of the tech- and non-tech-heads on earth.
Idiot politicians are not limited to any one country. And rest assured that they will keep trying to pass these BS laws.
No VPNs? From the same politicians who know the value of executive sessions?
What next? No encryption for anything?
Shades of the Clipper Chip, good grief.
This story is about Wisconsin lawmakers.
I don’t need the headline “Butterfly flaps wings in Amazon” to be headlined “World in peril”.
This is true. These laws are like sledgehammers in an antique store.
That said, violent and abusive pornography is prevalent and within easy reach of minors. In the UK, the average age at which children first view pornography is now 13 years old (10% view it by the age of 9). In a study by the Children’s Commissioner, it was found “frequent users of pornography were also more likely to have real-life experience of an aggressive or degrading sex act” and it has been linked to minors perpetrating abuse on other minors.
I won’t link to the full report as it is somewhat distressing. However, I hope that we can do better than throw up our hands as a society and say either it’s not a problem or it’s too difficult a problem for us to do anything about.
Some very smart people have reminded us, from time to time, about people who fail to remember the past.
US politicians only have to look back at an early attempt to legislate morality, to judge how effective a law that tries to “close the barn door after the horse has bolted” may be.
The 18th Amendment to the Constitution prohibited the “manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors…” and was ratified by the states on January 16, 1919. The movement to prohibit alcohol began in the United States in the early nineteenth century. On October 28, 1919, Congress passed the Volstead Act, which provided for the enforcement of the 18th Amendment. Prohibition ended on December 5, 1933, with the ratification of the 21st Amendment.
I suspect any real solution will not come from a politician.
“I’ve always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.”
US President Ronald Reagan
They can take my VPN when they pry it from my cold, dead hand…
The internet is saturated with content that is deleterious to human flourishing and the fabric of a just society—and it’s not just pornography. Your mileage may vary, but I’m as alarmed by rank bigotry and the glorification of cruelty and violence as I am about abusive pornography. And don’t get me started on online sports betting …
So long as it’s lucrative to create platforms that support the creation and monetization of this stuff, and so long as the people who own and operate these platforms aren’t shunned—indeed, are actively celebrated and awarded tremendous power—it will be a formidable problem to solve.