India tells public to shun Starlink until it gets licence | Hacker News Reader

India tells public to shun Starlink until it gets licence

reuters.com

65 pointssaguntum117 comments

The reality is far more prosaic than many people seem to believe.

Starlink has been reported to be taking "pre-orders" for the service at $99 in India; without having a license to operate [1][2]. This might seem like peanuts to the HN crowd, and the move to do pre-orders is completely in line with the "move fast" ethos of SV startups, but $99 is a non-trivial amount of money in rural India.

IMO the Government is right to at least warn people that they might not get the service promised, even if they do end up getting their money back. Also, in case Starlink decides to take the dynamic and innovative step of just keeping the money, it is unclear what recourse these prospective customers will have.

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[1] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/telecom/teleco...

[2] https://www.pcmag.com/news/india-spacex-needs-a-license-to-o...

If we all obeyed a dictum to "avoid selling things until you can provide those things", Silicon Valley would dry up overnight.

I fail to see a downside.

There is a difference in "avoid selling things until you can provide those things" and "avoid selling things until you are allowed to sell things".

What's the difference?

You may have the stuff you've invested into production of, and potential buyers willing to give you the money. But if your stuff is illegal to sell, tough luck.

So the real difference is between collecting preorders for something you MAY be able to fulfill in the near term vs something that you may be blocked from selling for an indeterminate amount of time.

Starlink will eventually be legal in India, but it could take decades. In this sense, there's no real difference between "avoid selling things until you can provide those things" and "avoid selling things until you are allowed to sell things". It's just that a normal person has a cutoff point where it becomes an unreasonable wait.

By default, all satellite operators are blocked in India. I haven't checked in last year or 2, you cant even use Garmin emergency devices which are becoming common in west outdoors. To use the satellite phones, you need to apply to the federal gov (called Central gov in India) and you can rent the phone from ministry. Atleast, thats the process for tourist or who are entering India from other countries. There are some changes happened in last 1-2 years, few satellite companies got the lic to provide services, but I am sure all the devices and services are highly regulated.

Since it’s just math in a machine and we have the math written down all over, what would be losing of long term value to the human species?

I have made a lot of money thanks to SV, but it’s not what puts food on my table; people where I live do. I don’t live near SV.

Billions of us don’t give af about SV. It’s all hype and our daily lives will look pretty much the same without it.

I don’t really see why that’s true, unless you consider companies’ pitches to investors to be “selling” something. Silicon Valley isn’t really known for the business model of taking money for preorders.

Given the current political climate, iI won't be surprised if they will get the license as soon as they cosy up the A company. Whatapp got license to do financial transactions (UPI) just after they invested in Ambani's Reliance.

That sounds like a conspiracy

This is standard stuff in all countries. If you need something political done and you have given (“invested”) a lot of money to something a politician cares about, it tends to grease the wheels. Happens in every government on earth.

It happens different amounts in different countries. And the difference matters. Government corruption is a major drag on the economy. And therefore less corrupt countries experience compounding growth that helps them become rich countries.

Corruption is a type of conspiring yes. Your point?

Conspiracy, or conspiracy theory?

Sick of seeing "educated" communities conflate the two.

Conspiracy theory infact: The investment was more than a year ago and whatsapp still doesn't have a full license to operate..

I will bet dollars to pesos that if Starlink fails to provide the service, the cause will be government corruption.

Therefore the government is warning people of the potential for them to get hurt because the government failed to get the shakedown that they're hoping for.

Excuse me if I fail to see said government as being in the right. Now you may think I'm just being cynical. But according to https://www.transparency.org/en/countries/india nearly 90% OF THEIR OWN CITIZENS think that government corruption is a big problem in India. I just think that the general public knows what they are talking about here.

Is the perception of corruption the same as incidence of corruption? If anything this only shows that this country takes corruption way more seriously than "developed" countries.

This shady ISP from a known market manipulator should have a license before they started getting pre-orders. We don't want another FSD pre-order snake oil.. Do we?

Dude. So the stock went 20x and you missed it. Get over it.

Regarding the license, the “snake oil market manipulator” said something about that. When asked what corrupt governments could do if they didn’t want their citizens to have access to the unfiltered internet he said “they can shake their fists at the sky”.

Because the ability to scramble signals is only something white countries have?

Not to mention this country has the ability to destroy these satellites if it came to it.

Did you see this? https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/01/spacexs-starlink-forms-ind...

Because heaven forbid the masses have Internet access that their government doesn't have the means to censor or surveil.

It's a reasonable concern for a government if the surveiling capability is shifted from themselves to a foreign government (USA with PRISM and all the other programmes)

The surveillance by foreign governments will happen either way.

What they Indian government is upset about is that they don't also get a chance to implement surveillance over their own people.

That, and bribes. They want their fair share.

In this case, they are probably also unhappy that they haven't received bribes.

True, the vary foundations of proper commerce are threatened!

Starling receiver receives as well as emits radio waves, isn’t that tightly controlled everywhere?

why would starlink have different rules than any other ISP licensed to operate in India?

Because Starlink has no physical infrastructure there and no plans to set it up.

You can access a website without that website being somehow licensed to “operate” in your country. You should be able to talk to Starlink equipment (which is in space and outside of India’s jurisdiction) without them being licensed in India.

You’re going to be shocked that

A) Starlink will have lots of Indian ground infrastructure once approved

B) Starlink will be highly compliant with nation state laws

C) Starlink will comply with filtering requests made by nation states when the revenue is lucrative enough

I think Starlink will have a hell of a time convincing any amount of prospective customers to smuggle in illegal transmitters - the triangulation of which is a solved problem

but this is a moot argument, Elon is interested in funding Mars missions, he will comply with Indian censorship/regulations because there’s no profit without their blessing.

Starlink provides access to geographically diverse customers but doesn’t work well for dense population clusters. And what promises have been made around censorship? Do we have any reason to believe that Starlink will avoid large swathes of the world in the name of censorship-free services?

Consider Indian consumer isn't with high purchasing power in comparison to EU, NA and APAC, Starlink can temporary avoid that and support Indian regional countries like Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. It is hard to believe Indian government able to tolerate that.

I don't think Starlink would currently work without base stations in India.

Couldn't they make it work for most of the population of India by putting stations near the border in neighboring countries?

Could they bypass the laws of a nation state by using inter-satellite lasers? Yes! But what leads people to believe that Starlink is going to ignore the laws of powerful countries?!

India is pretty sizable, and Starlink currently does not do any orbital routing, so you've got to be within a certain distance from a ground station so that the satellite has you and that ground station in view. I don't know what that distance is though --- maybe someone else can provide that.

If Sri Lanka also doesn't allow ground stations, that would make it pretty hard to cover southern India.

Even when there's orbital routing, there's likely capacity limits.

If Pakistan doesn't block ground stations, it may be a good solution for people in Jammu and Kashmir to get around the frequent government telecommunications shutdowns; assuming lax enforcement.

Pakistani sat phones , VoIP channels etc were always used for attacks in India[1] . So this too probably adds to that.

[1] https://m.economictimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/tmc-cla...

May be Ambani's Jio is upset.

Starlink requires massive annual cap ex, is bandwidth limited per cell, and needs very expensive ground receivers. Jio is the most cost effective large-scale bandwidth provider ever created! They are on two different planets playing two different games.

Actually, Starlink is not on a planet. (But that Indians don't like competition is understandable.)

It’s just a misunderstanding on competition. Many Reddit forums show Americans looking for Starlink to compete with their fixed bandwidth provider like Comcast. American cable providers have very bad support reputations but generally provide about 300mbps for about $70 a month these days. Starlink is not real competition for the cable providers. Starlink will be a massive upgrade for users in remote locations that currently have the choice between DSL and slow satellite services. Starlink is giant competition for HughesNet and ViaSat.

A bit of an outdated idea. Uber is illegal in many progressive EU countries. While it is free to operate in India.

Developed countries play the free market game as long as they are the mercantilist in the room.

Or NSA reading other country's ppl data.

This is nothing special to India or "evil" countries that like to censor/surveil their interwebs. Also, Indian politicians care far more about grift than they do surveillance (though they do also like surveillance.) We're talking about a country where one party tried to buy an election by distributing free color televisions: https://www.google.com/search?q=india+free+color+tvs+electio...

Many countries (the US included) regulate/license even receive-only satellite devices.

It's not for surveillance or censorship reasons, it's for interference prevention reasons. If they didn't regulate ground stations, space would be a wild wild west of people beaming whatever frequencies, at whatever signal strengths, they wanted.

Bit of history/trivia: many cell phones used to not support GLONASS satellite fixes within US territories because first telecom companies "forgot" to file the necessary paperwork with the FCC to get GPS chips in phones licensed for GLONASS reception. Then when they did, the FCC sat on the paperwork for no particularly good reason.

Used to be you could enjoy a GPS/GLONASS/Galileo satellite position fix on a cross-atlantic flight and watch as your fix dropped to just GPS the second you crossed into US territory.

Just wait until you learn about the Central Board of Film Certification

India is known to be really difficult to satcom providers. F.ex Inmarsat just recently got a limited license to operate their Ka-band service in India, but I think only on aircrafts and Indian flagged maritime vessels. Russia is also a bit difficult for requiring all terminals in their territory to register with the government, but at least fishing vessels can continue to use their satcom while in Russia as long as they register the terminal.

Just saying, it can take a really long time to acquire a satcom license in India. I think Starlink I Ku-band, so might be easier than Ka-band license.

How easy is it to enforce this? Can the signal be picked up on the ground?

ha ha yeah literally my thought. Why I can't just catch the signal now. It's all come to starlink hand right? Why starlink need Indian Gov permission?.

On a side note. I'm living in India. Finally we see some promising speed from Jio and have good stable speed from Bharath Fibernet( 150 Mbps )

The main way to enforce this is by restricting sale of the hardware. It's big and high tech, can't be smuggled into the country in meaningful quantities.

Competition and transparency cures all market woes.

It really doesn't, that just ensures that already giant western firms reign Supreme on the national markets of smaller countries

But if you like to take that slogan and spread it around, then I am sure which you might be quite happy with said outcome?

How does that work with ISPs, healthcare, tax filing, airplane manufacture, pharmaceuticals, online retail, and a whole slew of other crucial industries (especially in the US)?

Without appropriate regulation, competition is an empty choice between the members of an oligopoly at best, or becomes entirely absent at worst if the industry was captured by a monopoly.

Transparency is of course similarly toothless without corresponding forces of real competition and legislation to punish whatever crud came to light.

It might or might not be easy to catch someone. But, if things are anything like in Pakistan, if you do get caught you will be in trouble with the military, which is no joke.

Not sure, but the Indian coast guard is known to board ships to check … Guess most mobile satcom providers are geofencing to help customers not getting in trouble.

Lots of comments dunking on Indian Government as grandstanding or too corrupt and quoting extreme examples to justify this position. Sorry folks, not every other non Western or non Western-allied country is a banana republic. India does suffer from endemic corruption but that doesn’t mean that every decision is tainted by that for fucks sake. It’s entirely reasonable for the Government to ensure that a foreign corporation is going to offer a legitimate service, and has proper mechanisms to address grievances, before it’s allowed to take money from it’s citizens.

So, SpaceX started taking pre-orders for Starlink in India before they had license to operate Starlink in India.

I understand India being upset, but a pre-order is not the same as service. SpaceX is not going to offer service in India until its licenses are approved. But what's the harm in taking refundable pre-orders?

They’re taking people’s money and promising a service they don’t yet know they will even be able to provide (e.g. if they don’t receive the license). That’s dishonest. It’s not a preorder in this case - more of a kickstarter.

On par with what Elon musk does for FSD. American regulators do not care.

All pre-orders have the possibility of not being fulfilled. SpaceX is a lot more capitalized than a random start-up or a kickstarter, so they are significantly more likely than a typical pre-order of delivering the product and of issuing refunds if they can't deliver.

So I think you just have to have an objections to the vast majority of pre-orders in general if you have a problem with this. And if so, focusing on Starlink is clickbait and/or disingenuous.

>> SpaceX is a lot more capitalized than a random start-up or a kickstarter, so they are significantly more likely than a typical pre-order of delivering the product

In this case that’s not true. They don’t have control over whether or not the government approves them.

A preorder should be deliverable bar some extreme unpredictable circumstance occurring.

I disagree. Their product is already functioning. It's not a kickstarter. How is this dishonest? The only dishonest thing would be the government not allowing it for some unethical reason.

From the Indian government’s point of view, taking preorders might be seen as kind of a snub, like, “Your approval is just a rubber stamp we will get eventually.”

Caring about this sort of thing sounds like some toxic masculinity grandstanding childishness. So it makes sense that politicans would.

It’s in any Governments interest to vet new technology or services from multinational corporations before they are allowed to take money from its citizenry. SpaceX is not Governed by Indian law; so it’s pretty reasonable for them to be extra conservative when dealing with new kinds of services.

That's sensible, I agree. My response was to "feeling snubbed for allowing preorders", which is childish.

It seems more like a publicity stunt that Elon can use for childish "grandstanding" on Twitter; sometime in the future, if not already.

It should be that way... governments shouldn't be picking favorites or holding out for bribes.

Why is the company assumed to be good and the government bad?

It’s technically not functioning (in India) until it receives government approval.

The problem is with the order amount. $99 is a lot of money (Google pegs it at 7.4k INR) and anyways its a large sum even for an American with low income. The problem with pre-orders is the amount of money that gets locked. The government has to enforce its regulations via the proper channels and doesn't want to be in a position where they ask Space-X to refund the money whereupon they might sue and cause trouble at international levels. Informing the people that they haven't received their license is okay I think as it gives the government breathing room to have the same rules for everyone since they can always justify by saying "we told you so" and I think that's fair.

Secondly, the Indian government is under no obligation to deal with free-trade nonsense here. Space-X cannot and does not employ any Indians, so giving them an operators license and access to consumer base without actually being able to create jobs or deep expertise locally makes zero sense. In such deals, in the end, the only technological expertise that flows is crappy admin jobs and frankly no country should take such a deal.

The money isn't "locked" if the deposit is fully refundable at any time, with the only thing you lose being your place in line. And how is free trade "nonsense"? Do you think protectionism is a good thing?

What recourse do Indian citizens have if SpaceX decides to not honor its agreement? They cannot be sued in Indian courts. It’s entirely justified to be extremely skeptical.

> Do you think protectionism is a good thing?

Yes, absolutely it is.

Why can't SpaceX be sued in Indian courts? Does India have a law prohibiting that? In America you can sue a foreign entity and if it's found that the court has jurisdiction and you win then you can get a judgement against any assets the entity has in the country. I believe this has been used to seize a skyscraper in Manhattan owned by Iran among other things in the past.

US courts do not have jurisdiction outside the US; the only reason their orders are obeyed outside the US is because of the power of the US Government; if a foreign Government refuses and the USG wants to compel them, they can use diplomatic or other ways (e.g via sanctions) to make them. At the least, it can be used as leverage when bargaining for other things. As you can see, it just doesn't work the other way around.

They aren't extending their jurisdiction, perhaps you misunderstood my point. If the company has assets inside the jurisdiction of the country, then the country can seize those assets, regardless of the size of the country. You can see this in many instances across legal systems, I'm not sure if that's a standard feature of all legal frameworks but I think almost all that are based on English common law can do that.

If Indian courts aren't able to seize assets/impose judgements inside their jurisdiction, then yeah customers wouldn't have much recourse, I'm not sure what recourse customers generally have in that case then.

I think you are confusing jurisdiction with enforceability of judgements.

Jurisdiction is about whether the court is allowed to hear the case to begin with.

Enforceability of the judgement is about whether anyone has the power to do anything in practice if the defendant decides to ignore a judgement against them.

Just because the judgement you won turns out to be unenforceable in practice didn't mean the court lacked jurisdiction to hear the case to begin with. Jurisdiction and enforceability are separate concepts. Sometimes, the answer to the question of enforceability does not become clear until long after the judgement itself.

US courts (both federal and state) have the power to enforce foreign court judgements; I'm not aware of any rule which automatically excludes Indian courts from that. Whether they will do so in any particular case is a very complex legal question. In theory, the question of whether a US court will enforce a foreign judgement is based on legal considerations not political ones. Of course, in practice, judges are political animals and they will take political considerations into account; but, when they do that, they generally try to explain what they are doing as applications of apolitical legal principles, no judge wants to be openly seen to be deciding a case politically even if many suspect that to be their true motivation.

The financial argument is valid but nobody wants to pay money for a service they would want and then receive an email saying we can't provide it because "Indian goverment deemed it so". One scenario is the government doesn't communicate with the public and then Space-X doesn't get its license. Telling people to be cautious is okay. And anyways if Space-X has enough capacity, pre-orders shouldn't matter.

There's nuance here and sound policy lies on a spectrum between fully free trade and protectionism. Free trade in services without free movement of people is nonsense in my opinion. It almost always benefits the incumbent.

Starlink cost is 499$ for equipment and 99$ per month? That is way too high for broadband prices in India. Fibre internet of 100 Mbps is about 18$. Mobile 4G is even cheaper.

In that case, what's the problem? If nobody is going to buy it, then there's nobody that needs to be discouraged from buying it.

It’s about bribes.

It means losing the dictatorial control that the Indian government currently has over internet.

Starlink might make more sense as cellular backhaul in some places.

How many people have access to this 100 Mbps fiber though? From what I'm seeing on Wikipedia, the internet penetration rate is around 50% of the population. Starlink isn't intended to replace existing reliable broadband solutions. It's meant to provide internet access to remote areas where running fiber to those areas is way more expensive. Fiber and cellular (usually needs fiber backhaul) would be prohibitively expensive to bring to many areas of the world and telecoms won't do it unless the government pays for it. But for $500 up front and $99 a month you can bring 150-300 Mbps to remote villages and schools. They don't need a dedicated connection per household, 300 Mbps is enough to split across potentially dozens of households or even a smalls school.

Serious question: can you show me in a map where in India these remote villages and schools are that lacks cellular or fiber coverage?

There are many cellular coverage maps out there that you can overlay with population graphs, but I can't link you to anything specific besides just a coverage map. But this isn't a problem unique to India. Many countries have holes in their coverage, including the US. There are many parts of the US where you'd be lucky to get 1 Mbps down on 3G. Or where your only broadband option is DSL at a few Mbps.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/native-american-tribe-gets-early-...

> There are many parts of the US where you'd be lucky to get 1 Mbps down on 3G.

India has nation-wide 4g coverage with decent speed except inside reserve forests where nobody lives.

These "remote" villages seem to exist only in "developed" United States.

India shakes fist at the sky

They have already demonstrated the capability to shoot down satellites. Maybe the US should propose a treaty regulating the militarization of space, thus far they have rejected the ones proposed by other countries.

India's decision might sound silly--especially given how many people on Hacker News trust Elon Musk--but the Indian government is just worried in general about all types of businesses that could be selling expensive vaporware to poor people.

I don't agree with the Indian government's decision regarding Starlink, but I also understand where the underlying logic originated from.

China just outright banned all residential satellite dishes in response to Starlink. Gotta keep the people under control after all.

Is starlink uncensorable? India has a high number of internet shutdowns and maybe doesn't want to lose control of that.

Streisand effect? Of course, if the goal is payoffs to the government, raising awareness of Starlink might be in the government's interest.

define what value and relevance a license has for such?

How easy will it be to shootdown starlink devices?

I am sure it will be easy for someone to build an app that tracks your current GPS and the Starlink cause-ways and provide the telemetry data to shoot these things down with ease...

Does Starlink have a ChaosMonkey for such scenarios built in?

Imagine a world war - or even a war btwn 2 supers... killing starlink is going to be A#1 target.

Next to impossible to kill a starlink satellite and there are thousands of them, I don't think any country has the capability to to take starlink satellites down en masse by force. The US, russia and china could probably take down a few, but I doubt the stockpiles of anti satellite missiles of all three combined equal the size of the constellation. Guessing about that though.

You could probably blow up a nuke on orbit to EMP a bunch of them at once but that would have a lot of collateral damage.

Doesn't hitting one of them be good enough for chainlink reaction due to space debris? They are all on the same height and pretty close to each other.

The debris field would move generally with its original momentum, meaning I wouldn’t expect hitting one to take out the others in the same string.

If you're hitting it with a rocket the explosion should considerably change the momentum, no?

But not that it's really relevant anyway, these things are not close to each other at all in this context.

Hitting it with anything at those speeds causes and explosion. At low earth orbit (LEO) most vectors cause the debris to rapidly deorbit, but a few can cause a slightly raised orbit that could hit things behind it. The problem is, if such a chain reaction does start, it's not likely limited to a single orbital plane like starling, but to destroy every single LEO satellite and make LEO unusable for tens of not hundreds of years.

I'm not sure I would call 1600 objects scattered over an area about as large as the surface of earth "pretty close together". There's plenty of empty space between them

Couldn't you fly up a satellite with a small gun and a propulsion engine? You don't have to be much faster than the starlink satellites to eventually shoot down all of them, and it shouldn't take a big gun to make a satellite stop working. At least it should be way cheaper to destroy it than to build the network.

Orbital mechanics being what they are, you can't simply speed up to intercept something in orbit. Very roughly speaking, as you increase speed you increase the distance the opposite side of the orbit is from the orbited body. This means if you're trying to catch a bunch of satellites on a single orbital path you'll miss most since your orbit is different now. There are ways to do what you say but I dont know if any countries have managed to make a reusable orbital satellite killer like this.

Since you're talking about a "satellite train", so as to speak, I'm not sure you need to "speed up to intercept". If for example the orbital period is 90 minutes and the time between two consecutive satellites passing through the same point is 5 minutes, just make sure that your orbital period at the time of intercept is 95 minutes and then you can shoot down one satellite per orbital period. There's not a lot of maneuvering that the electrically propelled satellites could do on quick notice.

India is one of the 4 with ASAT capability, in addition to the 3 you mentioned. But it doesn't make sense to destroy even a single satellite (due to Kessler syndrome), if it is just to stop starlink service. The signal can just be jammed. Or even simpler - just monitor the uplink transmission and punish those who break the order.

It would be easier to attack/sabotage/JAM/DOS the ground stations.

Not hard to kill one, but probably hard to put up enough stuff to kill many of them with a single launch.

On the other hand, it would be much easier to take out the Starlink launch vehicles before they deploy the satellites and then wait a couple of years (given their 5-year lifetime) for the service to degrade.

>define what value and relevance a license has for such

Government compliance? India is a democracy. Tech may move faster, but that doesn't mean it's right. Voters decide what's right, ultimately.

The Amish are wise in this: wait for the community to approve technology, and only then apply it to their lives. The Government of India doesn't need to be held hostage by cybermancers, they can decide tech usefulness on their own time.

satellite internet is not a new technology.

come on now, you've been a superpower for over a year. get with the times.

It isn't about protecting the interest of the voters but about having power to shut down and censor internet at will that the Indian government doesn't want to lose.

> India is a democracy. Tech may move faster, but that doesn't mean it's right. Voters decide what's right, ultimately. ... The Amish are wise in this: wait for the community to approve technology, and only then apply it to their lives.

You mention democracy and then give an example of religious authoritarianism? What is the connection between the two?

The Amish vote on how their community moves. People regularly leave. It's the same thing.

> People regularly leave

People regularly fled from behind the Iron Curtain, too.

lol "tracks your current GPS"

Starlink is not going to be A#1 target in space in a new world war. Reconnaissance and Mil Comms satellites will be.

> and Mil Comms satellites will be.

Like Starlink in the future, then? Possibly? https://spacenews.com/u-s-army-signs-deal-with-spacex-to-ass...

Shooting down thousands of satellites would extremely expensive and piss off every other space faring country

Could be a piece of cake disabling mini sats with laser or microwave weapons, which I understand is rapidly seeing the light of the day.

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