The majority of internet control measures have a list of specified goals and a limited declared aim. This is not the case with the Anticorruption of Public Morals Act, which was proposed by six Republican lawmakers in Michigan. It prohibits not only specific types of adult content but also ASMR recordings, adult comics, AI-generated content, and any portrayal of transgender individuals. This is so broad that it takes some time to fully comprehend. The measure then goes one step further and suggests outlawing any VPNs operating in the state, even those made in the US, as if expecting users to just circumvent the limitations. It would forbid the selling of VPNs within Michigan, impose fines of up to $500,000 for infractions, and penalize internet service providers with the duty of identifying and blocking VPN activity. By all reasonable standards, it is among the most extreme state-level internet restriction laws in recent American history.
Virtual private networks, or VPNs, have emerged as a workable solution to the surge of legislation restricting access to pornographic content that have been passed in the UK, Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. A significant portion of the impacted population simply downloads a VPN, routes their traffic through a server in a different jurisdiction, and keeps using whatever they were using prior to the law’s passage when a state enacts age verification rules for pornographic websites. For years, proponents of content restriction laws have been annoyed by this behavior, and Michigan’s bill seems to be partially intended to address it by simultaneously outlawing the circumvention tool and the material. Even if the ramifications go well beyond the intended objectives, the reasoning makes sense.
| Category | Details |
|---|---|
| Bill Name | Anticorruption of Public Morals Act |
| Proposed By | Six Republican Representatives (Michigan) |
| State | Michigan, USA |
| VPN Ban Scope | All VPNs — foreign and US-produced |
| ISP Responsibility | Detect, block VPN use; banned from selling VPNs |
| Associated Fines | Up to $500,000 |
| Content Targeted | Adult content, ASMR, adult manga, AI content, transgender depictions |
| Applies To | All Michigan residents — adults and children |
| Legislative Status | Not passed committee; not voted on by Michigan Senate |
| Technical Detection Method | Deep packet inspection (DPI), IP blocking |
| Key Critics | Internet Society, civil liberties groups, VPN providers |
| Reference Website | legislature.mi.gov |
The issue is that not all users of VPNs are attempting to access content that is banned. They are used by journalists safeguarding their sources, remote workers connecting to corporate networks, travelers using public Wi-Fi in coffee shops and airports who would prefer that their banking information not be readable by anyone else on the same network, and regular people who have come to the conclusion that their internet service provider collecting information about their browsing habits is something they’d rather avoid. The corporate remote worker is untouched by Michigan’s VPN ban, while users who access banned adult content are not specifically impacted. Everyone is impacted, and it does so by making internet service providers—who are not well equipped to handle it—bear the cost of enforcement.
ISPs can try to identify VPN traffic through deep packet inspection or by blocking known VPN IP addresses, but doing so at scale requires significant ongoing investment and maintenance. Laura Tyrylyte, a privacy advocate at NordVPN, gave CNET a very clear explanation of the technical reality. Because VPN companies have created countermeasures, it is expensive, technically complicated, and not very dependable. In order to circumvent the deep packet inspection that the bill would ostensibly force ISPs to use, obfuscation technologies, such as NordVPN’s NordWhisper, are particularly made to make VPN traffic appear indistinguishable from regular web traffic. The VPN industry has been developing privacy infrastructure for years in anticipation of precisely this kind of legislative pressure, and the tools are more advanced than the bill seems to take into account. Examples include RAM-only servers that automatically delete activity data upon reboot and no-log policies validated by independent auditors like Deloitte.
Beyond the VPN issue, John Perrino, a senior policy expert at the nonprofit Internet Society, expressed concerns about unforeseen consequences. He told CNET that such restrictions on adult content can harm competition and the openness of the internet in ways that the bill’s authors may not have fully considered. These restrictions can affect music streaming, sexual health resources, journalism covering topics that touch on sexuality, and smaller services that lack the compliance infrastructure to meet the requirements. The law’s practical effect would be to concentrate traffic in a smaller number of large, compliant services while eliminating smaller alternatives because age verification requirements are especially burdensome for smaller platforms that lack the legal and technical resources of large companies.
The bill has not yet passed the Michigan House committee or been put to a vote by the state Senate, and it is unclear how much support it has outside of the six lawmakers who introduced it. This lack of support is significant, but it does not lessen the proposal’s merit. Such state-level legislation has a history of serving as a template; when one jurisdiction introduces something extreme, other legislatures modify and import parts of it, and even if no single bill passes exactly as written, the cumulative impact on internet access and privacy can be significant. Observing how Michigan’s legislators and the larger political discourse react to this idea will reveal important information about the true direction of internet regulation in the United States.
