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Comment by la64710 | Hacker News Reader

But the question is who gave this one guy right to surround our earth like this? As the power of individuals grow is there going to be any oversight to ensure a consensus is reached collectively before someone decide to do something like this? I agree that technically it may not be as bad as it looks but just in principle one cannot fathom the level of reach that modern civilization allows to just one person that this map demonstrates.

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Do you really think Spacex required no permission at all for this? It certainly required approval from the FCC & FAA to launch this so I think you could say that US government gave him the right to do this.

Then you could ask: "Why does the US government have the right to do this?" I think the answer to that is probably the Outer Space Treaty which is signed on by most countries including all major spacefaring nations.

This may have been stopped (and still can be) if there was major uproar among the US populace or by other countries. I don't recall hearing much about that.

In any case, I'm not sure there is a sufficient reason to stop it. The biggest issue that I have heard about is the potential for a negative impact on ground-based astronomy. That's obviously not good, but I'm not sure it's a sufficient reason to stop this.

Do you think China or Russia would ever agree to a global satellite internet connectivity initiative that allows anyone to easily bypass their information control mechanisms?

Even without notoriously disagreeable players like China and Russia at the table, reaching consensus becomes almost impossible past a certain number of parties involved. If global consensus were required for anything almost nothing would ever get done, and what little did happen would be design-by-committee’d into ineffectiveness.

That’s not to say that individuals should necessarily be able to do whatever they please on things of this scale, but trying to make everybody happy is a great recipe for endless stagnation.

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