[ninefathom]

I'm a bit perplexed that there seems to be minimal discussion on the complete technical absurdity of this ban.

Within the USA, there might _possibly_ be sufficient technical infrastructure available to block app downloads at a national level. Maybe. And leaving aside the myriad circumvention routes.

But at the state level? It's simply not there in the way that the legislators think. Application-level data? Turn off location services. GeoIP? Nice try- mobile carriers don't reliably egress in the state from which the customer traffic originates. E911? Protected by other laws. Cell tower location? What about folks near state borders, and there's no reliable vehicle to get that data to app store operators right now anyway.

What's good enough for an advertiser trying to sell concert tickets is not necessarily good enough for enforcing legal prohibitions.

Effectively, to enforce this would require cooperation between government agencies, mobile carriers, and app vendors on a scale that has not be done in this country before- and with two of the three parties not even remotely interested in such cooperation.

This thing is pure political theatre.

[amacalac]

the ban is more on Apple and Google - preventing them making the app available.

My guess is that it’ll be based on the billing address of the account tied to the device.

If the billing address resides in Montana, the app won’t be shown for download.

Aside from that, yes, I agree. Tough to do, and mostly theatre.

[ninefathom]

Running with the billing address example... so to circumvent the ban, all one would need is a prepaid phone plan. Service addresses are collected for those, but they're basically unused and there's no incentive on the consumer end for them to be accurate.

Even on post-billed plans, getting the billing address from the mobile carrier to Google requires a degrees of cooperation that is not currently in place. Apple may have an easier time in the regard, but then again they're not likely to cooperate either.