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With the recent news of X being banned in Brazil, it seems we're entering a new stage of the ongoing battle between major, multinational corporations and governments.
A common talking point on the left is that Musk is making a hissy fit out of Brazil, but has been happy in the past to censor for 'outgroup' countries like Turkey, China, et cetera. While I haven't looked into the truth of these claims, I think it's interesting to take them at face value, and ask why that's a problem exactly?
We have clear evidence that Facebook, Insta, Twitter, etc all heavily and not even secretly censored anti-right wing information (and even just true information) during the Covid pandemic especially, but also around other, more political topics.
So in this case, I suppose the question comes down to - if most people on the left think that censoring information during covid and around the 2020 election was fair game, why is it not fair game when someone on the 'other side' does it back to them?
Now personally I think that the censorship around covid was far more egregious, but again I'm hoping to pose a general question about freedom of speech, especially for these incredibly powerful media tech companies. Are we entering an era where elections are mostly decided based on corporate censorship? Are governments going to just cede power to the technarchs gently, or will there be more and more lawfare against them?
I don't think e.g. Brazil can really pressure someone like Musk much, but the battle between him and the EU, as well as the left side of the U.S. government, is certainly worth keeping an eye on.
Normies don't care about being anti-censorship on principle, they only care when it impacts a political opinion they personally agree with. And even then, they only raise a stink about it when their trusted political influencers tell them it's a problem. The "I just want to grill" conservatives might grumble a bit about covid censorship, but they really don't go to bat against it. Instead, half the Republican party is obsessed with trying to commit electoral suicide by loudly forcing women to have their rapist's child.
We've never been in the situation where elections are "mostly" decided by corporate censorship, nor will we ever be. However, it could push things lightly at the margins. But this is really no different than what the media was always capable of doing.
Right on the leadup of the 2020 election the New York Post's twitter account got suspended for publishing a story about the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop. The rationale at the time was 'misinformation' but pretty much every aspect of the story and the contents of the laptop has been verified as true and accurate.
The story was clearly newsworthy. And yet it was censored, at what we know now was likely the request of state actors.
Was the media always capable of crushing the spread of a story that a different media outlet published?
Could the marginal effects of this story spreading have impacted the outcome of the 2020 election?
There's a possibility it could have, but mostly because recent elections have been decided by razor-thin margins in a handful of swing states. Almost anything can impact the outcome of elections in such a scenario, like how the Comey letter plausibly cost Clinton the election in 2016.
Which certainly would explain why the sitting government would want to tip the scales so that the odds are generally more in favor of news that helps them coming out whilst stories that hurt them are more likely to be suppressed.
Literally, you're suggesting that even a tiny bit of thumb on the scales would be all it takes to, tip most otherwise stochastic elections towards the party with power to influence the media.
Well yes, it can be a factor. But then, lots of things can be factors. The original question asked:
Which is still a resounding "not really", same as it's always been. It's like asking if the media alone can start wars. If you squint, you can sort of see it, but you'd have to ignore a lot of other factors first if you wanted to declare it was "mostly decided" by the media (or censorship thereof).
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in your view, was the Comey letter more or less harmful than indicting Clinton on multiple felonies would have been?
The Comey letter was an example of an FBI effort to protect Clinton breaking down, due to absurd malfeasance on the part of Clinton herself and other Clinton-related individuals. The FBI did their best, but there were literally too many crimes to cover up. That is to say, subsequent crimes broke the coverup on previous crimes.
In pure polling terms, the Comey letter made Clinton go from +5ish over Trump, to ~+1ish. It'd revert a bit when he posted the "lol jk" retraction 3 days from the election, but most of the damage had already been done. By contrast, Trump being convicted of felonies did almost nothing since he's judged on an extremely generous curve. So in terms of polling, the Comey letter was far worse.
If the left was anywhere close to being as conspiratorially minded as the right is, it could have easily claimed that Comey made a conscious effort to throw the election to Trump with his October Surprise, and that the 2016 election was therefore functionally "stolen". But of course, they didn't do that.
Or many people believe the charges for Trump are trumped up kangaroo charges—not that he is graded on a generous curve.
Republicans will think any charges against Trump for any reason are politically motivated. Most don't think he's a saint or something, it's just pure culture warring -- circle the wagons and defend the leader from the outgroup no matter what.
Can you point to a case where the FBI offered Trump or his underlings blanket immunity in exchange for testimony that implicated only themselves, thereby forestalling any possability of prosecution?
Can you point to a case where the Logan act has been used to prosecute the underlings of politicians other than Trump?
If there is a clear disparity in how the law interacts with Trump versus other politicians, why should Trump's supporters not take this disparity into account, and object to selective application of the rules against their candidate?
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Sure. But the NY charges were bullshit. The Florida charges may have been politically motivated but they aren’t bullshit.
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Furthermore, how is Brazil banning X different from the US banning TikTok?
I suppose the US followed a lot more legal process around it (it was an act of Congress signed by the President) and isn't so much banning it as demanding that its principals fall under US jurisdiction, and at least the cover story is not over suppressing speech but around guaranteeing that the CCP isn't conducting surveillance on every American.
In broad strokes it feels the same though?
Tiktok is a national security threat in a way that X is not.
With Tiktok, Chinese intelligence gains a great deal of data about the U.S. military and intelligence, including the location of many or all of our secret bases and personal details about the people who work in them.
From a security standpoint, X isn't a threat because they are the least likely to share data with foreign governments. It's only a threat to those who wish to censor alternative viewpoints.
This seems like a fig leaf reason.
The Tiktok ban is purely about controlling the flow of information between users on the platform, and what the algorithm could push.
At some point, which they've long passed, making spying easier in effect grants the spies new capabilities, even though they "already could do that". (This applies to domestic spying too. The NSA could send out an agent to surveil any target that is caught up in Echelon, but surveilling everyone makes things so much easier that there's no comparison.)
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you claim to care about free speech but isn't sending information about secret bases and military personnel to the CCP a form of speech? :thinking:
jk jk
isn't the Brazil judge making a similar national security argument though? not around secrets but around public order? X is fostering hate speech and supporting the return of the deplorable Bolsanaro elements, or whatever?
It seems to me there's a non-trivial distinction between shutting down a network to try to prevent influence and data gathering by a semi-hostile foreign government, and shutting down a network to try to silence domestic political speech.
I don't think you could openly do the latter in the US. Though if Harris is elected, I won't be shocked if Musk is indicted on some tenuous securities charge to try to force him out of his companies in favor of more accommodating leadership.
All the big social media companies almost certainly employ spies that are exfiltrating data.
If I were running Chinese intelligence I'd think it smart to Br'er Rabbit the Americans about banning Tik Tok. If they actually do it then maybe they'll rest on their laurels a bit thinking they've actually accomplished something. It also provides a blow to their supposed principled stance on free speech, and the debate itself is a good distraction from my lesser known methods of collecting data.
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I'm pro free speech, but the distinction seems pretty blurry. Twitter is also gathering data, for sure, and I'm pretty sure you could also portray what they're doing as "influence". I guess it all depends on your relationship to the United States.
I justify my anti-TokTok stance by it being an ADHD-inducing brainrot machine, not by any political influence it has.
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But of course, any domestic political speech you don't like can always be easily painted as influence of a (semi-)hostile foreign government. What's more, any hostile foreign government worth their chops will try to influence your domestic political speech.
Under US law, I think this would also be fairly distinct from the TikTok ban. Allegations of foreign influence don't get you past prohibitions on viewpoint discrimination here. The TikTok ban is (probably) legal only because it hinges on a structural fact about TikTok (foreign ownership) rather than targeting any particular viewpoint.
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Rather than goverment vs corporations it is more about governments and companies who align agenda wise, although granted part of this process includes the goverment requesting censoring, or puttings its own people in charge.
I see it as a broader network/faction.
We are entering an increasing phase of authoritarianism. The Democrats certainly and probably several republicans, possibly even a larger share of republicans than in general, on the issue of speech critical of Jews, are after European style decimation of freedom of speech.
Moreover, the existence of centralized platforms, including platforms like this very forum where someone can decide to censor or ban people at will, it self represents a power grab against freedom of speech in a way. There is also the other side, where it also allows more communication. But meat space did have some less constraints.
I believe there is a direct relationship with moderators banning people and this being celebrated and with governments imprisoning people for hate speech.
So I see it as a struggle between figures like Musk, Durov, Torba, and a totalitarian far left faction. With someone like Musk possibly somewhat compromising with them in some areas and opposing them in others.
Another facet of this is technology which helps enable centralization of power, as also seen with A.I. models being different variations of super woke which makes it easier to take peoples freedom's away. Although if the technology was utilized differently, it could have had different effects. But the possibility of technology being used to centralize and create a totalitarian system is there and it is taken advantage of. It means we are facing a techno-totalitarian threat that is unprecedented.
Like the faction against dissent includes people in goverment and in corporations, those in favor of existence of dissenting platforms should include people both outside the goverment, but also people who ought to take influence within governance, as either legislature or executives. That way, if Brazil wants to get rid of X, but Z other country and politicians like Musk, then that raises the pressure against Brazil.
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A few disparate thoughts.
I suspect that the arrest of the Telegram guy in France was a trial balloon/shot across the bow to show that Western Countries can use a, for lack of a better term, "Chinese-Style" authority to physically detain extremely wealthy oligarchs and celebrities to try to reign in their open resistance to government edicts. Compare the "Russian-style" authority where they just chuck you out a window or crash your plane.
My model of how centralized governments think holds that NO such government will tolerate a serious power base outside of its own control, which includes any 'platform' or organization that, if activated, could attempt to seize political control of said government from the current holders (organizing to vote for particular candidates counts too!). The instant such an alternative power base seems to arise, the existing government will seek to either seize it, destroy it, or disrupt it.
They will do so with even more urgency in times of war or serious unrest, and we're sliding into such times.
It was all fun and games when tech companies were helping produce more wealth and providing said government with neat tools to e.g. surveil the public and detect crimes, or analyze economic data, or better weapons to fight their enemies. But the balance of power in the relationship is becoming untenable... from the government's point of view.
I believe the U.S. and European governments strongly feel like the tech industry represents such a power base, or at least that they provide the platforms that dissidents and political opponents can use to organize their supporters into effective movements that can then undermine existing power bases. And said governments can pay lip service to classical liberal ideals while plotting to disrupt those opponents and bring those platforms to heel all the same. End of the day this will mean threatening the people in charge of and operating those platforms with serious consequences. Which is hard to do if those people are extremely wealthy and generally popular, and your country has laws that inhibit the government from arresting citizens and taking their stuff on a whim.
The one thing I know for certain is that they will NOT simply stand by and allow power to accrue outside their hands until it actually destabilizes their authority.
Finally, I have literally never felt quite this much shivering terror at the realization that the group who believes in something like unrestricted free speech even and ESPECIALLY against the efforts of government to 'protect' us... is a tiny school of fish in a sea of indifference, patrolled by many censorious sharks.
I was aware that globally the concept or ideal of free speech was vastly a minority preference, but I didn't have much concern about what a Cameroonian or Indonesian thought was okay to say or not say. But even in the West, even in the United States itself it feels like I've got maybe 20% of the population that would honestly vote for a provision protecting free speech if one didn't already exist.
The left was never in favor of it but now they've gained enough institutional control to silence enemies on various platforms, the liberals have abandoned it in the name of stopping or getting Trump, the moderates just want to grill, and the conservatives/MAGA are generally shaky allies on this particular point.
With all the tools for censorship that are now turnkey ready to implement across the board, starts to feel like it is just a question of whom will be in charge when the governments of the world lock down speech entirely.
Why are you surprised? It seems obvious to me that "unrestricted free speech should be legal" is no different from "you can't defend yourself from my swing until and unless it connects".
What were your beliefs about freedom of speech and the importance of government power to crush dissent in 2007?
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I would characterize it more as "It should be legal for any given person to speak to any given willing audience without interference." Trebly so on the internet, where generally an audience seeks out a speaker and the speech doesn't interfere with anyone who hasn't actively sought it out.
The right to free speech has as a necessary corollary the right to hear. As in, a speaker and a listener/the audience both have an interest in the right to free speech, and both are 'infringed' when a speaker is censored.
That's less the case when someone starts throwing punches, there is no consent, implied or otherwise, to receive a punch, vs. the consent to hear a given speaker. Unless it is in an agreed upon boxing match, of course.
I'm sure you could find a listener who's interested in hearing the nuclear codes, or, as another user put it more saliently, the coordinates of a military unit at the frontline that you're entrusted with. The listener's right and interest to hear things is not exactly under question.
What's under question is why any society would want to have free season on coordinating violence/malfeasance. Classify all communication as "speech" and thus "free", and you get bizarre anarchy where no opsec can be enforced and no threat can be reacted to until it is made true on. Make exceptions, and you get to argue over the extent of the exceptions.
I approach you in a dark alley from behind and tell you to empty your pockets with my hand half a second away from retrieving my open carry gun and shooting at you. That should be legal, shouldn't it? All I did was speak to you. If you felt threatened, that's entirely on you. And besides, don't you have the right to hear what I have to say?
I mean, I still support contractual rights to restrict the spread of information, such as nondisclosure agreements and even certain forms of copyrigght.
The constant tension between the "INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE!" philosophy and "Some information can cause harm" is everpresent.
Ahh, this takes me back to arguing this stuff on 4chan and reddit back in the day.
What is your specific intent in uttering these words? Is it to give me some useful information that I desire to hear or that I requested to hear? If not, then surely I am entitled to take that into account when I judge how to respond to your speech.
"It should be legal for you to utter those words" and "it should also be legal for me to shoot you on the spot if you utter those words" are not in fact in tension.
In this case, the restriction on speech is more practical than anything. You wouldn't utter those words for fear of being shot. No third party needs to 'interfere.'
You would probably welcome an opportunity to hand over your valuables without a fight, rather than get shot/stabbed wordlessly and have no choice in the matter.
I'm sure you're very badass, but I do believe the advantage is on the robber's side here. I specified that the gun is holstered because I expected a gotcha about brandishing, but really, brandishing is a fake crime as well.
More generally, I do support shooting people who called you a slur on Twitter. Perhaps if more progressives did that, people wouldn't give them such information that they didn't desire to hear.
Ironically you've presented a scenario that I can claim expertise in, since one of my jobs is in fact self defense instructor. This precise scenario is one I have thought about and trained on literal hundreds of times.
The calculation I have to make is based on whether I think your gun is real, whether it is loaded, whether you have the wherewithal to pull the trigger, and, ultimately, if I'm faster than you. Which I probably am because, as stated above, I train for this.
And in the vast majority of hypothetical cases I would... hand over my stuff without a protest and let you go on your way. Simply the easiest resolution once you've pressed the matter. But you have acted in such a way that I will consider ALL options on the table. And my calculation will adjust based on whether I have loved ones with me and whether I have reason to believe you would kill anyway.
Simply put, YOU have to make a calculation too, and if your calculation has already included the possibility of being shot yourself and you STILL take this action, I can't speak well of your judgment.
And once YOU have made a statement that shows you are willing to kill me (or someone else) to obtain mere possessions, by my perfectly, coldly rational logic you have forfeited any argument for why you shouldn't be killed in return, so the only question is whether I think that is necessary to protect myself.
Similarly, if you claim that you want to suppress the speech of others, I would HAPPILY support restricting your speech because you can't really complain about being treated the way you already agreed its fair to treat others.
Symmetry is nice, like that.
It sure would. But you've already stated that its on twitter, so the means to do so would certainly not be present unless you go to the effort of locating and hunting that person down, which seems like a LOT OF FUCKING EFFORT when you could just walk away from the screen. Or you could just use twitter's own tools to mute the words you don't want to hear/read and block the people you don't want to interact with.
So there's a certain level of implied consent if you consider a particular set of words offensive enough to kill over... and yet you don't avail yourself of readily available tools that will prevent you from seeing those words at all if you don't wish.
I now recall that we've disagreed before on the meaning of the word "fairness". Yet again, you seem to have your own definition for "symmetry" as well.
It is not "symmetrical" to kill in the process of robbery and to kill in self-defense. The latter is a more "fair" act, even in a situation that is not evenly matched. I doubt even your training would provide you with the means to quickly and accurately evaluate any attacker in order to make your self-defense perfectly, rationally "symmetrical" (the classic home invasion scenario - few on this forum would say they'd hold themselves back from shooting the invader, even if he's not obviously armed and threatening). This does not matter in a sane legal code because as one who has not initiated the aggression, you are in the right.
Am I correct to assume that if I want to suppress others expressing a certain set of ideas A, you would support restricting my speech entirely? That's hardly symmetrical, and not very fair either. What would be symmetrical and fair is to support restricting my speech around the set of ideas A. You'll find that many people readily agree to such proposals. In my view, that supports my interpretation of fairness. People tend to agree to fair counterproposals and reject unfair ones.
I don't think this can be done before encountering the random person who'd say the words to me. Similarly, you can't shoot a robber before they appear and try to rob you. Instead, you rely on implicit intimidation to deter robbers. Instead of putting the onus on every possible robbery victim to "block" them, many would-be robbers decide not to rob in the first place.
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Because the west is still marketing itself as supporting free speech, and claiming it's different from / better than the autocrats in other parts of the world.
Though I suppose I agree that by now one shouldn't be surprised.
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The balkanization of the internet will continue, and has been since before the arab spring when it became clear social media censorship / influence was a security threat to autocrats, an influence vector for the west, and a basis for competition between the Americans and Europeans when the Europeans identified legislative / regulatory influence over American media companies as both an economic interest (see the attempts by national regulators to charge google news linking to country media groups) and a political influence interest (see the attempts to suppress the right / require political commentary in the name of counter-misinformation). Ever since the Chinese government enforced its own geographic regulatory zone over western internet providers during the early 2000s in the buildup of the great firewall, the ability and interest to construct similar regulator sub-divisions of the internet has been a growing interest across the world.
That said, I think X will 'win' this one, in so much that I don't expect Brazil to effectively cut off access to VPNs or Satellite internet needed to actually block Twitter from the Brazilian information sphere. In addition to Musk being able to write off the loss, Musk is both providing an internet service (X) but is also an internet service provider via Starlink, and even if the current US administration doesn't like Musk politically, it really, really likes the premise of Starlink, which allows access to X, and nothing Brazil will do will outweigh the Americans' interest in bypassing the regulatory firewalls via space network capacity.
Starlink (and the military extension starshield) have direct national security implications for the US government. You can see the direct military application implications in Ukraine, where it has given the Ukrainian substantial network access and military advantages the Russians struggle to degrade, and these are generalizable anywhere the US either wants to operate or wants partners or allies to be able to operate. These capabilities have non-kinetic implications either, such as natural disaster functions when land-based networks may be knocked down, critical infrastructure integration if a cyber-attack takes down land-based network connections, and so on. Starlink's resiliency and ability to survive / mitigate common disruption vectors is much of the point.
But Starlink also counters that balkanization of the internet, as a space-based, US-based, internet provider counters many of those balkanization efforts of regulatory enforcement in a way that the US government wants to happen to other internet-balkanization countries.
Regional internet regulation largely worked against internet service providers when the companies had to be working within infrastructure in the countries doing the regulating. When the company and the country disagreed, it was the company that bore the cost of enforcement, since it could be fined / have its critical infrastructure seized if it was found to violate laws. This is central to, say, the regulatory demands to keep personal data in-country (as opposed to the US)- where the infrastructure is matters. And regional internet regulation makes the companies pay the cost for stepping out of line, either in fees or losing access to the infrastructure.
But Starlink reverses the enforcement cost. Beyond freezing Starlink assets in a country itself, Starlink satellites are literally in outer space. Unless Brazil intends to literally launch a satellite to take down a starlink satellite, it's going to stay in space... and if Brazil were to try that, SpaceX- again owned by Musk- could throw up many more satellites for a fraction of the cost.
That leaves a general country two main avenues.
One is to try and take Starlink to court in the US and have the US enforce a shut-off to the country. This would almost certainly fail because this is the exact sort of scenario of maintaining access to the US internet that the US government wants anti-US countries to be unable to stop. While there are opportunities for the knives to come out for Musk, the ability of anyone in the world to access the US internet regardless of what their own national government wants is something the US has very, very strong incentives to maintain for strategic interest and ideological reasons. The same regulatory logic that allowed other countries to pressure US companies to regulate speech in their own countries is what protects US regulatory pre-eminence in its own market, which just so happens to happens to include it's satellites.
The other option is to go after Starlink / X-VPN users in the country itself. Which is where the enforcement cost starts to add up. Far more intrusive, suppressive, and aggressive governments than Brazil have tried to block satellite dishes and access to global comms, and the costs of doing so are non-trivial both economically and in social-political costs, especially when Starlink offers a service that is exceptionally useful the further away from government-infrastructure you are.
And this is without the internal politics of Brazil coming into play. The Supreme Court judge can ban X and demand fines on people who use VPNs on it, but that's a separate matter from an electorally-sensitive administration actually enforcing such things. It turns out that voters in relatively free democracies tend not to like governments who have huge poverty and crime issues instead sending the police in to check what sort of satellite dish you have. The Brazilian government's electoral margins aren't that strong, and the laxer enforcement is, the more effective X remains at functionally skirting the ban.
How long before authoritarian or neutral countries have their own version of Starlink? The advantages they give, if they're truly as big as you say, seem like they would attract the interest of other state actors to co-opt them. At that point, limiting Starlink is just a matter of banning its terrestrial assets in the country, which is easy enough. Normies can then switch to Chinalink or Indialink or whatever and not be that bothered.
Granted, this might not apply to the current situation, but Musk is playing a dangerous game here by directly incentivizing the creation of competitors.
Starlink is not a trivial undertaking. It's entirely possible that chinalink is outside the realm of possibility.
"Brazil-link" is certainly a stretch...
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That's the very hard part. The terrestrial asset of starlink is basically a satellite dish that goes for a few hundred USD, and will generally be indistinguishable from other generic satellite dishes. From the consumer end, the biggest difficulty is to establish a payment link, and there are long established market methods to enable that in ways that avoid general financial system monitoring, such as buying pre-pay cards with cash. And that's if anything is charged at all. There's nothing preventing, say, a government from broadcasting for free.
For a frame of reference, Iran in 1994 banned satelite dishes in general, and actively jams attempts to broadcast into the country. In 2011, BBC Persia was reportedly having around 7.2 million weekly Iranian viewers, which was about 10% of the population. As of 2023, that number is reportedly around 18 million 'in Iran and around the world'.
In short, even in an authoritarian theocracy with extremely intrusive and abusive human rights conditions and active jamming, you're still looking at significant information penetration. Countries with less resourcing of the suppression-aparatus and less will to suppress will do even worse.
You don't satellite-based internet to access the partions of the internet- you can legally access the Great Firewall of China from across the world already. Even North Koreans can access the internet, if they use the proper protocols / minder programs / etc. Regulatory internet barriers are for keeping people in, and it's the information they want to keep out.
Which brings the question of 'what is the point?' / 'why would you bring a lot of outsiders in?'
A Sino-link that exists to keep law-abiding Chinese in the Sino-web is unnecessary for anyone except the most remote / unconnected people. A Sino-link that brings in any Mandarin-typing outsider is an ideological contamination hazard.
The creation of competitors is a boon, not a malus, for stopping / rolling back internet partition. If everyone has access to all the different internet broadcasters, and if everyone defends their right to ignore the regulatory pressures of other countries, then no one can enact a regulatory monopoly even as everyone has enhanced access to non-approved media.
First off, thanks for replying. I always find your comments to be well thought out and high-quality.
My follow up would be to question if the situation with Iran is really analogous. The Great Firewall of China is fairly easily bypassed for anyone who wants to break containment, but most normies in China simply don't care enough to do so. Most people just want to browse whatever sites they're used to, and as long as they can do that then the other details are immaterial. So say a neutral (e.g. Indian or Russian) competitor to Starlink is born which promises to fulfill the wishes of whatever censorship regime a country may have. The government could then mandate that satellite dishes have to be of whatever visually-distinct partner brand is cooperating with them. Of course they'll never get 100% compliance, as people could disguise their dishes or whatever, but most people simply won't care about that enough to bother.
A complete banning of satellite dishes like Iran did would be costly as there are presumably a bunch of reasons why people would have them. But if the state tells people to switch from one brand to another, that's an entirely different story.
Thank you. The compliment is returned, and I appreciate reading your posts even when I disagree.
To the topic-
The point on Iran is that even when enforcement is done by a regime willing to brutalize the public, it's not feasible to keep satellite dishes out. Brazil is much able to do that, and that's before you hit the point that the more authorized satellite dish variants you have on the market, the easier it is to just hide your dish within the mess (or just out of easily inspectable sight). If someone is using the same technology base, this would be like trying to regulate cars by demanding distinctive tailpipes.
It takes a huge, system-defining prioritization to do a Chinese-style surveilance state to do such a thing... and as you note, even that is not enough to keep information out.
Which then comes back to 'what are you spending so much money and political costs for, exactly?'
Which applies to both the Starlink-suppression, and the Starlink-'competitor'.
The value of starlink as a commercial service is the internet access without having to build/have infrastructure on that part of the planet. If you are on that part of the planet, it is in many respects more profitable / sensible to just... build the infrastructure on that part of the planet. Which is what China already does through companies like Huawei and 5G networks, which produce separate geopolitical benefits that come from having your fingers on all the data. Brazil paying China to build a Sino-link to provide Brazilian internet is directly competing with money to just, well, paying China less per network capacity to build better Brazilian internet that can be physically overseen by Brazil. Corruption on such a scale isn't impossible, but it is stupid.
(Especially since the only cost-competitive space agency able to launch the satellites in the foreseeable future is... SpaceX.)
It also doesn't address the issue of ideological interest of the Americans to back Starlink on this. Starlink won't go out of business if there's business competition, because part of Starlink's value to the American government is expanding the information sphere, and it (or things like it) can practically be guaranteed funding regardless of competiting power states. You may even see the US subsidize Starlink (or equivalent) satellite-internet at a global scale in the future, just to undercut the businness of others. Providing American-media-sphere access across the globe is an interest in and of itself, no matter how many strategic competitors set up their own, and especially if they do.
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You can't use frequencies in a country without that country's permission.
Sure, yeah, hypothetically. But if Starlink operated in Brazil without permission, how exactly is the Brazilian government going to stop them?
Let's say I have a Starlink terminal in a house in Brazil. What now does the Brazilian government do to stop me from using it? They certainty don't have a panopticon or security state so thorough that they'll be in my home checking my electronics for frequency allocation violations.
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How exactly does this apply to what I said? This is a genuine question of clarification, not an accusation.
It seems like that should make Star Link trivial to block if the Brazilians really wanted to then.
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The newer versions of starlink have laser cross communication capabilities, so no terrestrial assets in the country are required. So you really would have to hunt down the end user dishes one by one.
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The Chinese Thousand Sails/G60 project just got its first batch of satellites launched earlier this month, though I don’t know the target timeline for operational use.
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The Arab Spring was irrelevant, and if that's all that happened, western goverents would be more than happy to preserve the Internet in it's old form. What signed the death warrant on the Old Internet was Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. The establishment thought that their foreign and domestic enemies will forever remain behind the curve in the "marketplace of ideas", when that assumption was disproven, they opted to take the autocratic route themselves.
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More charitably... there's one coherent position where the complaint isn't about compliance with complainer's principles, but that X-era Twitter is claiming a set of principles and not following it. You don't have to believe in free speech yourself to notice if someone wearing a Free Speech T-Shirt is also ignoring it. And in Musk's case, the economic incentives to drop principles when China or the Saudis ask are pretty overt.
((Though in practice, it's based on a strawman. For better or worse, Musk has never been a free speech absolutist so much as a formalist, and much of the high profile bad behaviors by X-era Twitter have reflected jurisdictions with weak or no formal right of free speech. And the 'higher' compliance-with-takedown numbers are Goodhart'd to hell and back: we know that the Official Requests have always been swamped by the unofficial ones.))
Less charitably, "who whom".
Too much charity. X was initially willing to censor in Brazil, though they complained about it. Then something happened, a bunch of secret orders, and Musk got his back up. Some of those orders have since been released (by a member of the US House, I believe, since X wasn't allowed to release them); they included global censorship. That is, censoring X outside of Brazil based on Brazilian court orders. That's something X has refused before, notably from Australia. So no, it isn't a matter of outgroup country vs ingroup country.
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