Nor do I have any desire to learn 52 states worth of individual laws that may or may not apply to me. I didn’t wire your computer up to the internet, you did that.
I would advise not running an online business then, because the law around jurisdiction and the Internet is well settled.
Geofencing is not trivial, cheap, or even reliable. Are there any cases of sites being legally required to geofence or do they all do it to preemptively avoid legal issues? I’ve only ever seen the latter.
I’m not trying to argue what is or isn’t the current state of law around this; I’m pointing out the absurdity of enforcing it this way and the strange way it’s being used to backdoor state laws into federal ones. This is extremely stupid from a technical, and legislative standpoint.
The goal here is to force sites to do age verification.
Creating absurd laws where the only possible way to not be held liable is to implement the age verification requirements regardless of the apparent source of the traffic is the tactic that they’ve chosen.
In the law, those are mutually exclusive. If either end of the transaction is in Utah, it is under Utah jurisdiction.
If you’re hosting an online business you do have the ability to block users based on location.
I would advise not running an online business then, because the law around jurisdiction and the Internet is well settled.
Geofencing is not trivial, cheap, or even reliable. Are there any cases of sites being legally required to geofence or do they all do it to preemptively avoid legal issues? I’ve only ever seen the latter.
I’m not trying to argue what is or isn’t the current state of law around this; I’m pointing out the absurdity of enforcing it this way and the strange way it’s being used to backdoor state laws into federal ones. This is extremely stupid from a technical, and legislative standpoint.
I agree that it is absurd.
The goal here is to force sites to do age verification.
Creating absurd laws where the only possible way to not be held liable is to implement the age verification requirements regardless of the apparent source of the traffic is the tactic that they’ve chosen.