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Comment by kickofline | Hacker News Reader

> It has come to the attention of the St Helena Government that members of the public may have acquired, imported and be currently using terminals, such as Starlink, for the purposes of internet connectivity. Using such terminals is in contravention of the exclusivity of current telecommunications licencing arrangements made under section 3(4) of the Telecommunications Ordinance 1989. From 1 November 2023 anyone using such a terminal will be liable to be subject to a ‘ceaseand desist’ order issued on behalf of the Government. A cease and desist order is an instruction to stop using terminals, and continue to refrain from using terminals, whilst the exclusivity of the current telecommunications licencing arrangements remain in force. Any breach of such a cease and desist order may result in the confiscation of the equipment.

Starlink seems to be illegal to protect the government’s investment in a monopoly on the main satellite.

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It's extra delicious when read in context of these quotes:

> In the summer of 2016, the United Nations declared access to internet is a human right. While we are just beginning to realize the internet’s potential for our island and with the prospects of a high speed cable arriving on our shores, perhaps now is the time to re-evaluate the importance of information technology for EVERYONE. Can we truly reach our fullest potential if access to the World Wide Web is available only to those who can afford it?

> Inhabitants of the tiny tropical island of St Helena pay through the nose for an internet service that mainlanders would have considered painfully slow even during the pre-Netflix era.

> St Helena’s isolation and reliance on satellite technology, means that internet services are limited and expensive compared to many countries, and are a major barrier to development. The top residential package offered in St Helena provides 13.3 megabytes of data at a speed of 1.5 megabits per second, and costs £180.50 per month.

A number of years ago NYC decriminalized ownership of beehives, and a journalist interviewed a bunch of people who had them anyway. They all had schemes to hide their hives. One guy made it look like an AC condenser, and went so far as buying himself work clothes to make him look like a repairman.

If you make it out of the right materials, it shouldn’t be too hard to conceal a starlink antenna without destroying the gain.

The Mystery of Red Brooklyn Honey:

https://us.latinhoneyshop.com/blogs/news/the-mystery-of-red-...

Relatedly, it's worth watching the entire Bill Gurley talk at the recent All-In Summit.

Edit: Updating link to jump to the relevant section of the talk. https://youtu.be/F9cO3-MLHOM?t=397

What's the connection?

The chat covers some egregious examples of regulatory capture in the US. Part of the focus is the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which purported to increase competition but in fact accomplished the opposite. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996

Thanks for sharing! I haven't come across this podcast yet and it looks like some great content.

Awesome! Thanks for the link. Ending regulatory capture is the main plank in RFK Jr's presidential campaign. He's mentioned the FDA, NIH, EPA, the CIA and the military industrial complex, but I haven't heard him talk about capture of the telecom regulators.

Sorry for the political ad, but I'm frustrated by news articles that say "voters don't want Biden or Trump", but fail to mention RFK's campaign.

(stepping off the soapbox)

Oh, and did you hear that neither New Hampshire's nor Iowa's delegates to the Democratic national convention will be counted? Or rather, they'll automatically go to Biden. I kid you not.

(I'll just show myself out)

neither RFK or Vivek Ramaswamy have a chance

if you would like candidates like that to have a chance, petition your state to allow non party members to vote in primary elections

partisans of any party are a now minority in this country but the growing number of independents dont know it yet and have no representation, while their participation in the primaries would smooth out the candidate selection

in the mean time, fawning over non consensus candidates are a waste of time

it is accurate for there to be frustration over the two predictable candidates because rabid partisans are going to pretend that the rest of the population have a choice (as long as its the "choice" they like)

To add to your suggested voter reforms, implement ranked choice voting instead of first past the post.

Does a monopoly make sense here? Pre starlink, there was probably a huge cost to bring internet to the island, and those doing so wanted to have some form of protection in order to confidently invest the capital to do so.

Yeah, I could totally imagine some long-term bandwidth lease funding the launch of a geostationary satellite.

But enforcing that monopoly against private users, i.e. not resellers/ISPs, seems somewhat extreme.

I wonder if other countries will (or have) ban Starlink for censorship reasons. Or frankly, lack of censorship control.

So much of our governance, if not all, is based on geographic sovereignty, and satellites can supersede that.

I hope we finally get more global governance to deal with more and more global issues.

I remember reading that Starlink routes traffic via base stations in the subscriber’s own country, in order not to anger regulators.

If you think about it it makes sense; otherwise governments could just ban the sale of Starlink equipment for violating the law.

Frankly it would be easier to enforce at the payments layer. Governments have a lot greater control over their financial system than the movement of physical goods (see war on drugs where drugs move freely despite massive interdiction efforts but money is done through currency as integrated financial products are easily monitored and controlled)

Telcos do pretty much the same -- US SIMs in China receive different Great Firewall treatment than Chinese SIMs, and I've seen some Chinese SIMs / phones on some cell networks in the US get routed back through the Great Firewall. Which is IMO pretty disgusting on the part of the US telcos, but sorta functionally the same as what you say Starlink does.

Can be seen as a positive or a negative:

You can still access your home country’s Netflix/streaming content. Log into websites that might geo-block (Homedepot.com blocks Europe…), log into work without security admins losing their mind about a “suspicious foreign access”.

Downside is that ads won’t localize into a language you don’t understand. I love it when that happens when travelling.

Actually with mobile roaming, I believe the implementation is that everything just gets tunneled back to your home carrier; so I think it is not so much the case that US carriers are deliberately discriminating Chinese traffic.

It doesn't have to be "disgusting on the part of the US telcos" to route Chinese SIMs through the Chinese Firewall if the other side of that agreement is that non-Chinese SIMs in China get to bypass that firewall.

Because ultimately, that means more ways to bypass that firewall. Chinese people in the US could but a US SIM to avoid the firewall. They could even take it home.

But routing Chinese SIMs through the firewall is only acceptable if the reverse is also true: letting non-Chinese SIMs in China bypass it. Otherwise it's just more censorship.

Seems unlikely that Starlink would put a base station on Saint Helena just to be able to serve some percentage of ~4000 population. Most likely the base station is somewhere else.

I've no idea of the numbers, but it's possible they'd one one somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic — either St Helena or Ascension — for traffic from aircraft and ships.

Indeed, they recently announced a deal with OneWeb [0] as the first under their new Ground Station Policy [1]. From the incredibly slick (for SH) promo site [2], it looks like at least some contingent of Saints are really excited about the possibilities here.

[0] https://www.sainthelena.gov.sh/2023/news/lease-signed-with-o...

[1] https://www.sainthelena.gov.sh/2020/news/satellite-ground-st...

[2] https://www.earthstation.sh/

I wouldn't expect Starlink to serve remote ocean areas until after they have their space lasers working well and can transport the traffic to a continent.

They already do provide service to ships.

Base stations on remote islands are a routine thing to construct. The British Empire built the first global telegraph network using their island colonies, and some of these routes are still used for Internet cables. Ascension Island for example.

They have global coverage, including oceans:

https://www.starlink.com/maritime

https://support.starlink.com/?topic=9eb841b3-2e43-a6fb-ecc7-...

They don’t need a base station now with their sat to sat lasers. They serve McMurdo now

Alternate take: "the current licensee will sue us if we allow Starlink".

It’s sad how $$$ legacy satellite services worked almost everywhere (Inmarsat, iridium, globalstar, even ham/hf), but now that it’s within reach of the poors, they get heavily regulated to oblivion.

Seems to me that ham radio doesn't fit in that list.

pretty sure the radios came first and then the regulations came after as it became more available. Depends who you ask whether it's been regulated to oblivion.

That could mean they don't plan to strictly enforce this ban, but are merely contractually obliged to officially ban it.

Why bother with Starlink if the fiberoptic subsea cable is live now?

It's not rolled out yet: http://sainthelenaisland.info/communications.htm#maestrotech...

> Due to delays in finalising designs for the new network, it is now accepted that it will not be completed by January 2024

If they haven't finalized the design, I'd say they've got a ways to go.

Is that for the cable or FTTP deployment on the island itself? Seems like they could at least get much better mobile internet rates using the subsea cable instead of satellite for backhaul.

I had a very difficult time trying to figure out if that subsea cable was online or not.

Per the ISP (Sure), it does appear to have been rolled out: https://www.sure.co.sh/assets/Banner-Links/PRESS-RELEASE-Con...

You still have to run the cable the last mile, even on an island.

Not necessarily, we have wireless technologies. Stringing cables along poles could well be cheaper, though.

I’m thinking with 4G, 5g, one day 6g and one day 7g, physical data infra’s days are numbered or will become a premium product at the residential level.

Except in Canada and elsewhere where the mobile and wireline providers are the same and deliberately keep mobile pricing high enough to disincentivize cord cutting.

None of those create more radio spectrum. I don't see a real replacement for wireline fiber and ethernet ever.

Each "g" let us modulate more data in the same channel size. Spectrum re-use via smaller cells is virtually limitless.

And we're re-allocating more spectrum for 2-way data regularly.

But if the cells keep getting smaller, at some point it will be cheaper to just bury that one fiber to beat out 12G plus the next 5 generations, rather than buy another cell to cover that one household.

Redundancy is also nice – given how remote Saint Helena is, I could imagine repairs taking quite some time.

Because the government seems highly regressive and is almost certainly controlling and monitoring the one cable they've allowed?

I’m curious where you get that impression. From their public communications, they seem to me like a pretty chill bunch. And from the size of the island, I’m not sure the advantage of snooping on the wires versus just gossiping around town. That’s assuming you could find and pay enough qualified staff to do the analysis, given that “anything to do with a computer” is on the “shortage occupation” list that automatically qualifies you for a work permit. [0]

Even in this hand-wavy announcement clutching their pearls at Starlink, they were careful to build in an extra few months for people to finish importing and hiding their Starlink terminals before they might start sending sternly-worded letters...

[0] https://www.sainthelena.gov.sh/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Sh... (PDF)

There was a line, I believe in the Machineries of Freedom, that says the goal of "effective" libertarian politics is not to change laws - it's to design disruptive technologies that make existing laws irrelevant.

We saw one version of this with Uber and Airbnb, essentially blowing up taxi and rental regulations, respectively. This is happening with AI, where regulation is hopelessly lost in its current state. We have seen this (unsuccessfully so far) with finance and the blockchain. And arguably this is a legacy which traces its way through industrial revolution (which saw the breakup of monarchy's monopoly on labor and land) or even the stirrup or the sword.

Breaking existing rules and being unregulatable is probably an intentional point of Starlink.

"This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?" -A Man For All Seasons (1966)

Depends: are we cutting them all at once?

The context of the quote is a debate about whether to give the Devil the benefit of law. And yes, it was cutting them all at once to get at the Devil.

You can watch the original at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMqReTJkjjg. (I picked the longer version at 3 minutes that includes the leadup to why the debate happened.)

> Breaking existing rules and being unregulatable is probably an intentional point of Starlink.

Looking at Starlink's coverage map (for stationary service at least), they seem to very much be playing by the rules (i.e. international laws and regulations regarding satellite communication services): https://www.starlink.com/map

A "break rules and become unregulateable" approach would not have service boundaries corresponding to political borders.

The map is not the territory.

Don't these sats orbit the entire Earth? How is it possible there's anywhere on the planet (except maybe the poles) that they don't cover? Especially the eastern half of the US is particularly puzzling on that map.

Satellite-to-satellite forwarding is still being rolled out with Starlink, and without that, every satellite needs to have a ground station within its view to work.

The initial constellation also lacked polar orbits, which limits the maximum latitude at which satellites are available.

But both are being addressed now, and then it’s really only a question of regulatory approval.

I was of the impression that the waitlist in the Eastern US was more a problem of saturated capacity than one of coverage.

And we can see the effects of bypassing laws in stark relief - the erosion of decades-fought labor laws with the gig economy, the rent spikes from AirBnb forcing scores into homelessness.

This is the problem with deregulating businesses (as opposed to deregulating people).

Direct link:

https://www.sainthelena.gov.sh/2023/news/use-of-unlicenced-t...

This is a good reason for the new King of the UK to override that territory’s law

The new King has no powers to do anything like that. It'd be up to the British government to stick their noses in, if at all possible.

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