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by notquitetrue 845 days ago
You’re not entitled to use Elon’s satellites. And in reality, the service is aggressively priced. It seems they only started breaking even a few months ago.

Also, costs are not geographically uniform. They need regulatory permission to operate in a country, and some countries make that easier than others. Sometimes market access means paying lots of tax too.

1 comments

This is only correct in lawless land, such as right in the middle of Africa.

In most nations, in even some totalitarian dictatorships(dictatorships hate those opinionated and powerful), you are only allowed to deny services by conditions and to extents tolerated by law.

Some developed countries are moving towards Internet and smartphones as human rights, and handing out phones to homeless people. That implies it's rather phone network operators that don't have the entitlement to speak of such entitlements.

The nation owns everything. The nation can take and give anything anytime so long its owners agree(the monarch, the dictator, the party, the people collectively). It's always been that way.

Yea, it can take your life, your children, your freedom, and your dignity right along with the wealth. You harbor a view of "positive rights", that you are entitled to property that belongs to someone else; positive rights stand in direct conflict with negative rights, things that you are free from, like censorship, or search and seizure. Negative rights create economic cooperation and create robust societies with diverse opportunities, positive rights create bread lines and mass murder.
>The nation owns everything. The nation can take and give anything anytime so long its owners agree(the monarch, the dictator, the party, the people collectively). It's always been that way.

It cant take anything from an individual that they aren't willing to give up. They can make things very hard for them if they decide not to.

Huh? Starlink is in the US and his right to operate physical satellites is under US jurisdiction. So even acknowledging this middle-school observation of yours that governments can in fact confiscate property, the only leverage foreign governments have over Starlink is the right to deny him permission to transmit into their territory. (Even then, only because the US mostly respects international agreements on this. The US lets Elon transmit into some countries like Iran without their permission and there’s not much they can do about it).