Beginning 1 September, we will need to geoblock Mississippi IPs

How is this vaguely sufficient to meet the legal requirements of the law? They know geo-blocking is insufficient.

IANAL, but there’s a question of reasonable burden. Not sure if that applies here, but it’s not unreasonable to say you simply don’t want to do business in a state where the regulations are cost prohibitive. Given they make a reasonable effort to not provide a service to MI, it’s not really on them to police people trying to circumvent a state’s local laws.

Pornhub and BlueSky have done similar in response to this legislation in Texas. Wikipedia and a few other sites blocked the UK to avoid being burdened by their Safety act. Pretty much every streaming platform implements regional geo blocking for licensing reasons.

I’ll be curious to see how things shake out in the long run given the current political climate.

IANAL, but if the actual legislation did not either recommend or dictate which method would be either good or even considered valid for purposes of enactment of the law, would it then be subject to interpretation?

Also, for the enforcement agency who is/will be tasked with checking things out here...do they know whether geo-blocking is valid method or not? Its a silly law, don't get me wrong...but if its enforcement validation mechanisms are not up to snuff, i wonder how things will play out - both here in dreamwidth's case and other folks in a similar boat?

> Wikipedia and a few other sites blocked the UK

No? Wikipedia is not blocked in the UK.

For the record, Wikipedia has not (yet) blocked the UK. They are awaiting official classification by Ofcom of the Wikipedia website. However, the uncertainty is definitely vexing, and the direction this is going is truly worrying.

> How is this vaguely sufficient to meet the legal requirements of the law?

It may not be, if the law can be applied to them.

OTOH, may be sufficient to make it illegal to apply the law to them in the first place. US states do not have unlimited jurisdiction to regulate conduct occurring outside of their borders, but they do have more ability to regulate conduct of entities intentionally doing business within their borders.

Is it insufficient? The law says they need to take commercially reasonable efforts to verify people's age in Mississippi. Geoblocking is a pretty commercially reasonable effort to identify who lives in Mississippi, and they don't provide service to those people.

Good callout! Sadly, I’m unable to update my comment to correct. This whole area of law seems to be busy lately.

The law requires them to take commercially reasonable measures. Geo-blocking is industry standard/best practice.