Hacker News is the best parody of itself.
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.