I wondered this too, but came to the realization that it will be like any other ISP, and comply with any/all local laws it has to comply with to get the revenue that it is ultimately a company's job to get.
Most companies don't engage in activism/disobedience at the expense of revenue. Apple censors the App Store and backdoors iCloud for the CCP (via state-operated servers) to operate in mainland China, for example.
The ground stations will have to be fairly close to the customers for a while, and the customer antennas aren't particularly covert.
It will probably have all manner of government-mandated filtering like any other established commercial ISP. After all, it's nothing without its ground stations right now.
EDIT: It was HN that changed my view on this, in some of the comments in the HN thread on my Starlink blog post. I started out hopeful and idealistic about Starlink being an anti-censorship technology.
Use decades old techniques to identify your exact location and lock you out? Only interesting question is which side the company picks when the border is disputed.
The country that's banned your service has exhausted almost all its leverage.
As long as you make a moderate effort, so they don't feel inclined to jam your service or shoot down your satellites, who cares if the signal bleeds over the border by a few km? Not like they're going to make you double-illegal.
There are already a handful of countries that restrict the import of things like sat phones, CB radios, etc.
The Starlink dish will just be on that same list of prohibited goods, and Customs will stop them coming into the country.
(I was warned NOT to take a sat phone on my trek all the way around Africa - governments of countries like Rep. Congo, Sudan, Nigeria and a few others don't like civilians (especially foreigners) having that tech)
I was in Kenya in the 90s. The government there were OK with you having two-way radio equipment, just as long as you compensated the national telephone carrier for their loss of business. I believe the cost was quite astronomical. Oh, and certain frequency bands were banned.
A starlink terminal needs to transmit in known bands and have clear unobstructed view of the sky, and looks quite distinctive. Authoritarian states like Iran are totally capable of training cops to use portable spectrum analyzers, which are not nearly as big or costly as they used to be.
I'm not saying it's an impossible problem to solve, but will require some real time and effort.
I know Cuba strictly controls which antennas can be imported into the country. I think it would be pretty hard to sneak a Starlink device in undetected, even if Starlink supported it.
Most companies don't engage in activism/disobedience at the expense of revenue. Apple censors the App Store and backdoors iCloud for the CCP (via state-operated servers) to operate in mainland China, for example.
The ground stations will have to be fairly close to the customers for a while, and the customer antennas aren't particularly covert.
It will probably have all manner of government-mandated filtering like any other established commercial ISP. After all, it's nothing without its ground stations right now.
EDIT: It was HN that changed my view on this, in some of the comments in the HN thread on my Starlink blog post. I started out hopeful and idealistic about Starlink being an anti-censorship technology.