Unless we consider China to already be "split" from the rest of the internet, which it isn't for people with means, but is practically for the everyday person.
I'm not just calling HN out here. Every community has some kind of bubble effect where members of that community think they're a representative sample of the whole world.
And, at times, that lack of self-awareness occasionally rises to such extreme levels that Poe's Law is invoked, and you can't tell the difference between someone caught deep in the bubble and someone taking the piss. Hence why HN can come off as a parody of itself sometimes.
One example is suggesting that people in oppressive regimes will just switch to satellite phones because they want a free and open Internet that badly. Another, which I linked elsewhere in the thread, is somebody poo-poohing Dropbox when it launched because "you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem" [0]. Really, how much of Dropbox's demographic is even going to know what these technologies are much less are willing to take the time and effort to build such a setup themselves? Or, for an example outside of HN, Slashdot's CmdrTaco poo-poohing the iPod with "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." [1].
And, yes, there are HN parodies out there where you can see just what kind of content here gets parodied. [2]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
[1] https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6747373
(and as a side not, I do like how HN now has a rule against casually dismissing people's work, because it does help address this problem)
My point wasn't that sat phones are going to be ubiquitous it was that actually splitting the internet is impossible. Downlink is ridiculously fast and uplink is fast enough to ask for data. Once you get data on the ground its on the other side of the Internet wall, which means that if there are private networks at all they'll get the data.
You can't block the flow of information. You can just mold it and shift it now. And that is what the Chinese state is doing. They are fully aware who has real internet and they let some of them have it. They're essentially pragmatists.
And how many actually will?
I mean really, satellite phones?
Unless we're planning on moving our entire terrestrial mobile data infrastructure to be satellite based, that's just not practical. To even suggest it is just the height of naiveté.
If someone can already provide her family access to LCD Chinese culture, what benefit is there in her going that extra mile to get access to LCD Western culture? (Ignoring the fact that she's probably not even aware there is a difference between a cell phone and a satellite phone in terms of data access. And please, answer that question from the perspective of the average Chinese female secretary just trying to get her kid fed and put to bed every night. And try to answer honestly.)
A historical parallel is the use of shortwave receivers inside the USSR to receive Radio Free Europe. It was illegal to listen to, and the KGB jammed it sometimes, but people listened secretly anyway and it was an important conduit of information into an otherwise mostly closed society.
No it wasn't, really. Have you actually experienced this or are you retelling some long-read from New Yorker? Sorry if it reads as uncalled for personal attack, just that I and my family have much more first-hand experience with this, and while having western news was nice, it really didn't affect the political stability of the regime in any meaningful way.
People are not rational. They don't make decisions based on information presented to them. They mostly just repeat whatever opinion they perceive to be popular, usually without even asking themselves if they believe it or not. Propaganda is not about making people think something. Propaganda is about making people think that most of other people think so.
For sure, a shortwave broadcast isn't going to change the majority opinion the way 24/7 propaganda can. But it can influence a few intellectuals, who in turn influence others. It's impossible to do a randomized controlled trial to measure its effectiveness.