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Comment by brenden2 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what will happen (politically) in countries that engage in mass Internet censorship when SpaceX's Starlink constellation goes GA. I've always believed (perhaps naively) that the Internet is a great equalizer for information. Free (as in freedom) and unfettered Internet access seems like one of the few things that could make it incredible difficult for bad and oppressive regimes to operate anywhere in the world.

If I were a billionaire philanthropist I would try and find ways to get as much Internet connectivity into the hands of impoverished people.

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As a billionaire philanthropist you will still have to align to your home country’s foreign policy, because your billions only have value so far as the State enforces your property rights.

So very concretely, if China says "hey US of A, please don’t bring uncensored Internet to my citizens: it would be a shame if all this manufacturing and trade suddenly stopped", and the US gov agrees, then Elon Musk will not provide uncensored Internet access to Chinese citizens. Else, Elon Musk will cease to be a billionaire and the Internet access will stop working anyway.

Unless he hoards wealth and assets in a third party area, like Mars, Antarctica, or his private home with a hired army

Billionaires still need the protection of a nation state. Their wealth would go away quickly if they had to finance an army. Maybe trillionaires can pull that off.

He'd have to have them on bitcoin payroll.

Maybe some kind of cryptocurrency, but it's unlike to be Bitcoin. When people get paid, they want the value of their payment to not massively go up/down each week.

You can be paid usd amount at the fx at the time of transfer in bitcoin and you can convert it right away if you want. Or use stablecoin for transfers. It's actually relatively trivial to have dozens of options of payment options depending on employee preference (I mean once you have cryptocurrency payroll setup it's not difficult to have all available options... available and customizable by receiver).

How far are we really from private armies really? Sometimes I feel like the US is descending back to feudalism. The billionaire tycoons of today are just lacking homage of some PMCs to be modern day barons of their own domain.

The "army" for these billionaires is an army of lawyers and lobbyists.

... then again that reinforces the existing system, not a descent to feudalism.

You think China could make the US government make a private citizen censor the Internet in a different country?

1. Stopping trade with America would completely destroy China. They could bluff, but they have very little actual leverage. Their economy is hugely dependent on the US.

2. The US government is not really a fan the Great Firewall or of the Chinese government. It's unlikely it'd just be cowed into submission, especially with Trump in office.

3. Even if the government wanted to not upset China, I don't see how it could stop Starlink legally. You think a law would pass that would make it criminal to distribute uncensored information in China? There would be so much public outrage at that. I can't imagine either party supporting it at all. Plus, I can easily imagine that being struck down as unconstitutional. It would spend forever in the courts at the least.

4. Even if it did pass, Starlink would just move to Canada or South Africa or somewhere before it services China. In no scenario can Musk lose his billions. The US loses half its space economy, but there's no mechanism to take his money or to actually stop Starlink.

> 1. Stopping trade with America would completely destroy China. They could bluff, but they have very little actual leverage. Their economy is hugely dependent on the US.

No, US is really only 10-15% of China's export if you consider that a lot of USA trade on paper is not actually going to USA

The US government ignores ITU broadcasting restrictions hence VOA. China is also not going to cut back on exports.

VOA gets jammed, no? I'd expect Starlink to get jammed as well if they look likely to become a popular censorship-circumvention mechanism.

Even if they had that sort of leverage, we would still gain some price for exerting that control. So it would still be a win-win for the US.

China has the technology to shoot down satellites. If SpaceX tries to circumvent China's laws they'll just take out their constellation, so SpaceX has no leverage there.

Smaller, third-world countries, maybe there are more chances there. Citizens would likely need to import and manufacture their own antennas illegally that connect to the constellation.

A large part of the advantage of Starlink is that (thanks to SpaceX launch costs) it might genuinely cost more money to destroy than it did to launch. This makes it far harder to deny its use to the US military in times of conflict.

(SpaceX has claimed the cost to build and launch a single Starlink satellite is already under $500,000)

SpaceX has already said that Starlink hardware will be offered by partners for countries outside the United States, in order to abide by local laws (i.e., in China, the hardware will have to route through the gfw)[0]. It won't be a magic bullet for censorship, unfortunately (unless you could smuggle a US router into another country, but there may be some kind of DRM or something to prevent you from doing that).

[0]: https://spacenews.com/spacex-plans-to-start-offering-starlin...

It is ridiculously easy to geo-fence these solutions, because the position of the ground stations must be known for the system to work (and spoofing won't be possible because then your signal will get steered to the wrong spot), so SpaceX could still block/reroute people's access even if you're using a region-unlocked ground station from another country. And if smuggling foreign equipment into China becomes common you can bet that location-based censoring will happen instead of equipment ID-based censoring.

Wonder if the commonly disputed borders of some countries is going to make things tricky in those areas?

It is nearly guaranteed that SpaceX will ask the US government what their official stance is and comply with that. They have a lot of space launch contracts that they don't want to lose.

Yeah, probably a good approach in this instance.

Most satellite systems allow countries to block access. The first tier is refusing to sell to locals/local billing addresses (which is ALSO imposed by sanctions, e.g. due to USA, satcom vendors with any US connection don't sell to Iran/NK); the second tier is allowing countries to ban operation within their borders. There are tricks (what actually matters to the satellite is your exact delay, so there's a range of spots which look the "same", and you can spoof GPS or fake it in the firmware...), but that's more applicable to fixed C/Ku VSAT than it is to portable systems like Starlink.

I'd love it if the US gave Musk the diplomatic/military cover to make Starlink available globally, but we might end up with issues (ITU or jamming/military) if that happened. Might still be worth it though.

> what actually matters to the satellite is your exact delay, so there's a range of spots which look the "same"

That's potentially true for GEO systems. It's not at all true for LEO/MEO systems, where ⓐ that "range of spots" is rapidly moving over the surface of Earth as the satellite does, ⓑ you have AOS/LOS when the satellite crosses the horizon, and ⓒ you can get enormously improved bandwidth for a given power budget by using highly directional antennas on the satellite as well as the groundstation. Starlink is LEO.

> I've always believed (perhaps naively) that the Internet is a great equalizer for information

Except people can't see the entire internet every day, which leave the information that people actually see in the hands of the curators, just like it always has been.

You can't connect to the satellite via your end device, you need an antenna.

So, a regressive country can just control the import of such antennas.

Starlink needs special phased array antennas. Unless those become commoditized they can just ban imports.

Just a few days ago there was an article on the front page about a commodity phased array that has unfortunately been discontinued (60ghz for wireless TV): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22109708

We'll get there eventually.

Is there even a need for this when existing technological measures work? There's alternate DNS servers, VPN services, TOR bridges, obfsproxy, and shadowsocks. I've even heard that you could get pass the gfw by using a roaming sim card from hong kong.

These solutions take technical know-how to implement. And often times instructional sites, VPNs, and such solutions are also blocked because they help people engage in "cyber-crime."

So the censorship is effective for >99% of the population, and if you've got one friend that knows how to get around the censorship and starts blabbing about coverups going on in your country, then they sound a lot like a nutjob. And there are also the people that just don't care about the censorship as long as their daily life isn't directly affected.

You're obviously right when it comes to Turkey, or at least their past efforts to block, which were somewhat half-hearted.

But there are now countries that are willing to shut down the internet completely, at least for short terms. Cashmere still has no internet if I'm not mistaken, and Iran also had several shutdowns of about a week each in the past months.

Unfortunately, the track record of technology isn't that great when it comes to technology. A functioning court system, independent press, and strong civil society are far more useful than tor, encryption, bitcoin, or any other attempt in that direction.

They can simply outlaw possession of the equipment for connecting to it. Kind of like how guns don't make it incredibly difficult for oppressive regimes because they simply don't allow everyone have them.

The internet is just a tool unfortunately. Use it as you wish.

Make no mistake, new oppressive regimes will arise which make use of the internet as a tool of oppression. It is not without its costs and they are currently unmeasured as we have not seen the effect of children being exposed to this at such young ages as they currently are. What the internet is also doing is dissolving all culture that does not adhere to a central political set of goals. We also have no idea of the long term effects on our bodies so much concentrated RF radiation will have. 4G 5G WiFi ect. In medicine there are years of trials before a new substance or technology is deemed safe and that is only for use in hospital facilities. No one has been able to run long term tests to see what the effect of being constantly living in RF fields will be and children do not choose to be exposed to this RF radiation.

> What the internet is also doing is dissolving all culture that does not adhere to a central political set of goals.

Aren't the various cultural groups that seem to have sprung up online (including social media) a counter point to that?

I’m wondering how furries, etc. fit into these central political goals. Not taking a position either way but ends could that serve?

The internet giving rise to new pseudo cultures, does not counter that it is destroying real world cultures

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