I'm keen to see Starlink deals with government censorship requests. Can a country even effectively enforce their requests? How will China enforce the Great Firewall for instance?
By pressuring Tesla. One thing making me nervous with Tesla's China business is that it will become too big for Tesla to let it fail, at which point Tesla (and every other Musk company) will be beholden to the CCP.
Concerns like this are why I think he considered taking it private again. He can personally not give a fuck and decide to pull out of China anytime, but being a public company and “acting in shareholder’s interests” might get in the way of ethics...
Wait, are you implying Musk would move out of China, but the shareholders would want him to stay? You do realize he's done nothing but praise China right? Let alone that much of Tesla's funding would dry up if he "went private".
The reality distortion field around musk is insane...
Even if Musk didn't own Tesla, I don't think SpaceX wants to pick a fight with the Chinese government unnecessarily. It would be a distraction from their core mission – which is to drive down the cost of access to space. Starlink's role in that is to provide a guaranteed customer to increase scale, and to provide profits which can be directed into further space ventures. Picking a fight with the Chinese government doesn't serve that mission in any way. If Starlink gets a reputation for being a thorn in the side of the world's governments, that's going to damage its success in countries other than China, by reducing the likelihood those other countries' governments will approve it.
SpaceX may or may not decide to bring Starlink to China. But either they will bring it to China following the Chinese government's rules, or they will geofence it so it can't be accessed from Chinese territory.
Maybe it will be moot since CCP might likely fund, steal, push for - whatever it takes - their own internal 'ip' & supply. Maybe batteries are difficult though.
totally! this is one area i am 100% fine with theft all around - it should be called sharing & cooperating together in a world wide fight to reverse climate catastrophe!!
I understand people panicking about this, but lets cool your horses a bit.
First of all, SpaceX will not sell Firewall circumvention in China. They are an ISP and need to follow the rules if they want to officially sell there.
Second, even if somehow people got terminals and try to use them, SpaceX could block them. And even if they didn't, the government could locate these people, relativity easily.
Third, even if you assume the CCP is so 'diabolical' to attack Tesla, because of SpaceX. The are not a universal power, China has big plans to have their own car companies be exporters of EV and export batteries and be a major player in the battery supply chain. If they went after Tesla will some BS rules, I would suspect it would cause an international issue on the highest level and would lead to tit-for-tat style destruction on all sides potentially.
SpaceX will never be beholden to China, neither will Boring or Neurolink.
Tesla is literally the largest selling EV maker in China.
And if CCP simply starts attacking foreign auto-maker based on pretences based on pretences. Then the US have a significant interest in paying back China auto and battery makers in equal measure. And European car makers and companies also have to seriously ask them-selves when its gone happen to them.
The deals about how the car market is set up, is being made between countries and are part of international agreements.
> Tesla is literally the largest selling EV maker in China.
That's true for the Model 3 for the first half of 2020 only, they were a long way behind in 2019 and were outsold by the Wuling Hongguang Mini EV in the second half of 2020. Most of their competitors sell multiple models as well meaning that in some of those months they sold more EVs than Tesla overall.
The Model 3 smashed it for a few months last year, but they're not the largest selling EV maker in China.
Russia already has law in works to make possession of StarLink hardware illegal. There was some coverage in January: https://m.slashdot.org/story/380606
While you can often see the claims that simple citizens can be fined under the proposed law, I could not find an official confirmation. Here is the law in question: https://sozd.duma.gov.ru/bill/1086353-7
The relevant part can be translated like this:
> (not complying with the law) entails the imposition of an administrative fine on officials in the amount of ten to thirty thousand rubles; On legal entities - from five hundred thousand to one million rubles.
For some reason the part about officials gets applied to simple citizens, which is completely incorrect in my understanding of the law.
So my guess is that you will not be able to legally to import Starlink receivers into Russia unless some kind of agreement will be achieved, but simple citizens owning such receiver will not be prosecuted (well, at least in the near future). Though they may be prosecuted under a different law if they'll try to share the unrestricted Internet access with other people. It's quite similar to VPNs, currently it's not illegal in Russia to use it to visit blocked resources, but it's illegal to provide such service (though any sane person would not use a VPN-service based in Russia to work around those blocks in the first place).
I imagine China will apply pressure to the company/officers. If that fails, they will track RF emissions and disappear users. If that fails, they will start RF jamming. If that fails, accidents in space.
More interesting than China though are regional communications shutdowns. Will India be able to turn off communications in Kashmir? Will various countries be able to turn off the internet on national school entrance exam days? Will democracies for show be able to turn off the internet when the votes aren't as expected?
> How will China enforce the Great Firewall for instance?
By filing legal complaints through the ITU (which is a UN agency), probably. I expect some international treaties probably come into play. Basically, China complains to the UN, the UN tells the US they can't provide Internet service in China unless they follow China's rules, and then the FCC tells SpaceX that if they don't comply the FCC will shut them down.
Of course, the US government could just decide to ignore China and let SpaceX do whatever they want. (This is all assuming that SpaceX wants to be the Robin Hood of the global Internet and take censorship from the powerful and give access to the poor and not worry about the geopolitical or economic consequences. They might just want to be a regular internet service provider that follows all the rules in whatever country they operate in and doesn't make waves.
They could also just not offer service in China.)
You either intentionally lying or you simply don't know what are you talking about. Not only the law in question only has administrative fines, no jail time, but also it has not been even accepted yet. Also it may not even apply to simple citizens, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26460626
That doesn't really matter, the point is that an authoritarian regime has an easy solution. In Russia they may or may not limit it to fines (I'm not sure if it can be converted into criminal charges if you accumulate too many fines?). In China they may go for jail time right away and given China's past performance I don't see that as a too wild assumption.
Enforcement on the ground is one way to do it, but by going through the legal route they may be able to prevent SpaceX or anyone else from even offering a service in China. No need to hunt down rouge dishes in China if the FCC in the United States does not allow SpaceX to violate other country's laws.
It's kind of a weird situation. I mean, it's space, so you'd think you'd be outside of any legal jurisdiction and be able to get away with whatever, but actually satellites and radio communication are heavily regulated and subject to international agreements and treaties.
It would only take blowing up one satellite to let the world know they're serious about it, at which point SpaceX would almost certainly be forced to comply with China's demands, if only because SpaceX would have to acknowledge that the debris from even a handful of destroyed satellites would cause serious danger to the operations of the rest of the constellation.
All satellite dishes are easily detectable when they are in operation - they have to transmit RF radiation which can be detected and pinpointed to source anywhere from low-altitude all the way up to space. Anyone of a certain age who lived in a country that required TV licenses remembers the enforcement trucks that would detect RF emissions from vacuum-tube TV sets using directional antennae.
Starlink already said they will comply with whatever is needed from a specific government, including selling through local resellers and routing through things like the GFW. It’s not designed for censorship resistance, the only real way around it would be to get a foreign dishy/modem.
I would be surprised if it was that simple. Countries like Russia and China are going to want a very visible method of knowing whether a given ground dish is the normal version or their countries specific version. Anything that is just cosmetic would be too simple to fake. The biggest problem is that if any other entity controls the satellites themselves; they could turn routing the the GFW on and off which would be a huge security risk for these countries. (i.e western countries pressure Starlink to turn GFW routing off).
I wouldn't be surprised if China just started their own state sponsored low orbit satellite internet.
Another decent, cheaper middle ground would be operating just the 'first-hop' satellites that ground units communicate with and adjusting the technology such that the dish units used in china are substantially different in terms of the actual RF. Then these China run satellites enforce the GFW and then route traffic to Starlink and other 'non-china' satellites.
The biggest downside I see to that setup is that this satellite technology has to in a non-geostationary orbit which means you need a lot more satellites to get 24 hour coverage in a specific location. This isn't a problem if you want to provide service to the entire planet but for country specific networks; the extra satellites are a bit redundant.
The even safer option is to make running a ground dish itself a government enterprise. Private/non-state ownership remains illegal but the state uses Starlink et al. as just another backbone in their state network. This is probably the most likely since it is far simpler to integrate and control.
Starlink's stance on the issue is probably enough to satisfy countries like the UK that have some unique internet laws but are still satisfied with using the normal western legal process to enforce their needs.
I think if they want to operate in China, the Chinese government will tell them all traffic from Chinese customers has to be routed through a Chinese government controlled backbone operator, and the surveillance and censorship will be applied there. So Starlink won't have to directly apply any censorship. They will not be able to use laser links to route traffic of Chinese users to other countries. (Possibly the Chinese government might make an exception to that restriction for business use, such as low latency connections for financial markets.)
I'm not sure if China will let them operate though – nothing to do with censorship, to do with protectionism. They might want to reserve the Chinese market for a future Chinese controlled constellation.
Until such time as they are approved by the Chinese government to operate in China, they are going to geofence their satellites to refuse connections from terminals located on Chinese territory.
I think the "if Amazon/Google/FB don't comply, someone else will take their place" argument is weaker when replacement requires a constellation of thousands of satellites.
> I don't think anyone has the ability to shoot down enough Starlink satellites to make a difference.
Not with rockets, but maybe with lasers? What damage can a single one do? Could a country deploy them at specific orbits to have enough coverage to destroy a sufficient amount?
We are very very far from that happening. Even with most satellites being in the same torus around earth, if every single one in orbit right now were to instantly shatter, each piece would have something like a 1000sqkm volume to roam in.
Seems like there's an opportunity to produce an open-source SpaceX compatible antenna that someone could build themselves. I wonder if at some point SpaceX could allow this on their network?
I’m not an electrical engineer, but (both) family members who got electronics qualifications have told me RF phase matching circuits are a PITA to build right, and this antenna is a many-element phased array.
They told me this about 20 years ago and I don’t know what’s changed since then. Presumably someone here knows if it’s still hard or if it became easy since 2001?
indeed. i'm leaning on that "at least" pretty hard. i figured establishing that you'd have to spend as much as the prefab'd hardware cost in order to get something that isn't warrantied, and would be the first thing starlink customer service would blame your problems on, would be enough to make this completely unreasonable.
FWIW, there was a video with I believe Gwynn Shotwell saying every country, including the USA, required an “off switch” to receive approval. Nothing about line item censorship was mentioned.
ADV China did a video segment about this. It's already illegal in China to get satellite dishes, they really are afraid of their citizens knowing what's really going on.
China has started building their own satellite broadband constellation (up to 12,992 have been applied for) that is routed to comply with their policies.