Hacker News Reader

Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

No mention of the legal problems. SpaceX is pitching to become a worldwide last-mile intenet provider. Each country, the US included, will have issue with that. They will each set regulatory burdens, censorship limitations, that will make SpaceX's life difficult.

I have yet to see any real plans for downlink locations, the places where the satellite network will integrate with the fiber backbone that is 'the internet'. The system cannot be funneled through a handful of locations in the US. For the mega constellation concept to work you need hundreds of local downlinks so that connections don't have to hop across too many sats before exiting the network.

View on HN

Possibly. Current hellholes put burden on to user - sat phones are required to be registered in China, Russia, India, etc.

Only sat-phones or any satellite communicator like my Garmin InReach Explorer+?

I think much of this can be solved (for SpaceX, not for customers) by downlinking customers in the same country that they reside in.

Yeah, this doesn't seem like a huge problem. It's no different than trying to figure out taxes when Amazon is spread across the globe; the fact that the entity "Amazon" is spread out doesn't mean that the seller, distributor, and purchaser of any given product has concrete legal locations. With the downlinks needing to be on the ground for performance and hookup reasons, SpaceX would have to go out of their way to break local laws; they're going to automatically pick up the ambient network environment unless they do something special and very deliberate.

Generally, this is solved by tie-ups with a chosen local vendor that handles the nation-specific registration, laws, etc.

Ya, but look into the regs for even a developed country like Canada. When it comes to downlinking satellite data they are all stuck in a pre-megaconstellation regulatory regime. There are often laws stating that the host country have veto power over all data going up/down to the sat, that the sat not handle data that the host country cannot control. They do not envision the concept of multiple satellites communicating between themselves.

Given that regulations were once written, I got to think that regulations can change. If there's a technology that really works, and people really want/need it, and it solves the expensive problem of connecting rural communities, I don't see regulators just being like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 'Yeah, that'd be cool, but law's the law! We already printed these books!'

And if other countries have it and it prevents yours from 'staying competitive', important people pay attention.

And if that civic approach doesn't work, some rich farmer tells his senator buddy on a hunting trip that he wants Starlink to watch Netflix in the woods, and the senator tells the regulator to make it happen.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com