this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2025
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United States | News & Politics
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I'm not saying Wisconsin will legislate that all sites do it (although they can actually pass whatever stupid rules they want as long as they can convince judges not to strike them down as unconstitutional). I'm saying larger commercial sites (think Fansly and OnlyFans and sites like that, not free tube sites) can, and already do, detect if you're connecting from a VPN provider or cloud provider and then ask you for ID if you do regardless of its geographic location, in order to ensure they are compliant with all these state ID laws. Because they have too much revenue at stake to risk an AG like Ken Paxton coming after them over it.
Are you under the impression that web sites can't detect when you're connecting from a VPN? Here's a site that provides information like all of Proton VPN's server IPs around the world.
https://www.netify.ai/resources/vpns/proton-vpn
Here's how to find Amazon Web Services public IP ranges
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/aws-ip-ranges.html
It is 100% technically possible for web sites to detect that you're connecting through a VPN or from a cloud service provider network and respond accordingly.
Of course there are, but I was replying to a comment that said basically well we can just VPN out of Wisconsin and so the sites won't know we're from Wisconsin so they won't enforce Wisconsin's laws! And my response was not so fast, there are sites that see you're from a VPN connection and instead say "oh we don't know where you're connecting from so we're going to collect your ID." That's it.
I'm not suggesting anything technical about the internet. I'm observing what some companies are doing technically with respect to VPN usage. I have speculated, when asked, as to why these companies may be doing what they are.
Agreed.
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