Comment by jimkleiber
2 years ago
I wonder if other countries will (or have) ban Starlink for censorship reasons. Or frankly, lack of censorship control.
So much of our governance, if not all, is based on geographic sovereignty, and satellites can supersede that.
I hope we finally get more global governance to deal with more and more global issues.
I remember reading that Starlink routes traffic via base stations in the subscriber’s own country, in order not to anger regulators.
If you think about it it makes sense; otherwise governments could just ban the sale of Starlink equipment for violating the law.
Telcos do pretty much the same -- US SIMs in China receive different Great Firewall treatment than Chinese SIMs, and I've seen some Chinese SIMs / phones on some cell networks in the US get routed back through the Great Firewall. Which is IMO pretty disgusting on the part of the US telcos, but sorta functionally the same as what you say Starlink does.
It doesn't have to be "disgusting on the part of the US telcos" to route Chinese SIMs through the Chinese Firewall if the other side of that agreement is that non-Chinese SIMs in China get to bypass that firewall.
Because ultimately, that means more ways to bypass that firewall. Chinese people in the US could but a US SIM to avoid the firewall. They could even take it home.
But routing Chinese SIMs through the firewall is only acceptable if the reverse is also true: letting non-Chinese SIMs in China bypass it. Otherwise it's just more censorship.
Actually with mobile roaming, I believe the implementation is that everything just gets tunneled back to your home carrier; so I think it is not so much the case that US carriers are deliberately discriminating Chinese traffic.
Can be seen as a positive or a negative:
You can still access your home country’s Netflix/streaming content. Log into websites that might geo-block (Homedepot.com blocks Europe…), log into work without security admins losing their mind about a “suspicious foreign access”.
Downside is that ads won’t localize into a language you don’t understand. I love it when that happens when travelling.
Seems unlikely that Starlink would put a base station on Saint Helena just to be able to serve some percentage of ~4000 population. Most likely the base station is somewhere else.
I've no idea of the numbers, but it's possible they'd one one somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic — either St Helena or Ascension — for traffic from aircraft and ships.
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I wouldn't expect Starlink to serve remote ocean areas until after they have their space lasers working well and can transport the traffic to a continent.
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They don’t need a base station now with their sat to sat lasers. They serve McMurdo now
Frankly it would be easier to enforce at the payments layer. Governments have a lot greater control over their financial system than the movement of physical goods (see war on drugs where drugs move freely despite massive interdiction efforts but money is done through currency as integrated financial products are easily monitored and controlled)