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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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