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Comment by jliptzin | Hacker News Reader

Would starlink help or is that too expensive? Or would governments block import of starlink terminals anyway?

Unregistered satellite phones and satellite internet terminals are already illegal in India.

No mesh or satellite internet solution will fix a government.

Community mesh networks are hard to run and require real effort even if the local govt is not hostile. With a hostile govt it gets much harder. Unwirerer is a nice fantacy, but unlikely to become reality anywhere.

Those Starlink dishes are pretty obvious. It would be very easy to photo an area using an Drone/UAV to see who has them. Those who have them will experience some fun time in the local re-education camp.

You're assuming that the government blocking the internet is especially oppressive. It could be that the country is relatively free, but the government sees internet shut downs as easy to implement and thus uses them often. This seems to be the case in India, as discussed above. In that case, a solution that requires the government to visit every individual's home to get them to shut off the internet would actually be quite hard to implement, and would likely be infeasible.

Why would it be hard to implement? Remember that unregistered satellite phone and internet terminals is illegal in India. The Starlink dish is not small nor easily hide-able if you want to access the Internet.

They don't need to visit everyone's home. As I said drone and UAV photos, then you know which home has it. Then re-education for those owners.

Do they need line of sight? I assume the dish would still work with some kind of blanket or plastic shroud over it, provided it was kept in the acceptable temperature range.

Or even just being painted to camouflage into the roof it was mounted to.

There'd be reasonable aesthetic reasons to do these things, from a deniability standpoint. Though I guess that doesn't help if you're under a regime where accessing an unauthorized satellite service is straight up banned.

The countries mentioned in the article pretty much falls into the 'we can do whatever we want with you' category. Russia, Myanmar, Sudan, etc. There is no deniability standpoint.

Yea I imagine there is a fairly easy solution to this problem. And if there is not - I guarantee you creative people in India are going to figure it out!

But there's no solution to the problem of people voting in governments that think frequent internet shutdowns are OK?

It depends on the government, many of the "bans" are not very technologically advanced and easily circumventable with a bit of knowledge (however, doing so is usually quite illegal).

Australia and New Zealand have banned lots of content that can be easily found, at worst you need a VPN.

We are talking about internet shutdowns not "bans", so how are you going to "circumvent it with a bit of knowledge", unless you plan to break into isps buildings and you need a license to operate an ISP in India in case you didn't know.

Starlink still uses ground stations which would fall under the local Internet control.

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