Comment by legitster
2 years ago
There was a line, I believe in the Machineries of Freedom, that says the goal of "effective" libertarian politics is not to change laws - it's to design disruptive technologies that make existing laws irrelevant.
We saw one version of this with Uber and Airbnb, essentially blowing up taxi and rental regulations, respectively. This is happening with AI, where regulation is hopelessly lost in its current state. We have seen this (unsuccessfully so far) with finance and the blockchain. And arguably this is a legacy which traces its way through industrial revolution (which saw the breakup of monarchy's monopoly on labor and land) or even the stirrup or the sword.
Breaking existing rules and being unregulatable is probably an intentional point of Starlink.
"This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?" -A Man For All Seasons (1966)
Depends: are we cutting them all at once?
The context of the quote is a debate about whether to give the Devil the benefit of law. And yes, it was cutting them all at once to get at the Devil.
You can watch the original at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMqReTJkjjg. (I picked the longer version at 3 minutes that includes the leadup to why the debate happened.)
> Breaking existing rules and being unregulatable is probably an intentional point of Starlink.
Looking at Starlink's coverage map (for stationary service at least), they seem to very much be playing by the rules (i.e. international laws and regulations regarding satellite communication services): https://www.starlink.com/map
A "break rules and become unregulateable" approach would not have service boundaries corresponding to political borders.
Don't these sats orbit the entire Earth? How is it possible there's anywhere on the planet (except maybe the poles) that they don't cover? Especially the eastern half of the US is particularly puzzling on that map.
Satellite-to-satellite forwarding is still being rolled out with Starlink, and without that, every satellite needs to have a ground station within its view to work.
The initial constellation also lacked polar orbits, which limits the maximum latitude at which satellites are available.
But both are being addressed now, and then it’s really only a question of regulatory approval.
I was of the impression that the waitlist in the Eastern US was more a problem of saturated capacity than one of coverage.
The map is not the territory.
And we can see the effects of bypassing laws in stark relief - the erosion of decades-fought labor laws with the gig economy, the rent spikes from AirBnb forcing scores into homelessness.
This is the problem with deregulating businesses (as opposed to deregulating people).