Hacker News Reader

Comment by miki123211 | Hacker News Reader

Starlink is not an ISP in the traditional sense.

If a normal ISP wants to operate in country a, they need infrastructure in country a. This means they either follow country a's laws or that infrastructure gets seized.

Starlink could just as well be operating entirely from the US, and there's very little that foreign governments could do to stop them if they break some foreign laws. They could make payments and shipping complicated, which is probably why Starlink would rather comply if the requests are somewhat reasonable, but Musk has indicated multiple times that he's willing to stand up to unreasonable restrictions if the need is dire enough.

View on HN

This is not at all how laws actually work. If you sell a product to customers in a specific country, you generally have to comply with local laws. You might be able to avoid this if you're very small and your service is entirely virtual. However, as long as Starlink needs to provide their customers with physical hardware, there are numerous ways to enforce regulations.

And you can always go after people - and I mean both Starlink executives and customers.

Right, if this is how it worked we’d have to explain how companies like DeepCool and Huawei are banned from doing business in the US.

Half of the EU have also banned ZTE and Huawei equipment, so it's not just a US thing.

Some countries require you to have ground infrastructure in the country to operate satellite systems. Starlink's architecture also means they need to have a lot of ground stations all over the place. They can skip some areas if they need to and still offer service, but they'd seriously struggle to provide a global service by using only US ground stations.

Yes, but...The skinny is that the end goal is a massive station on the moon, and a single, powerful downlink fron there.

This is facilitated by two things.

First, we at Starlink are on the cusp of forcing light into 'particle only' mode, or PAM. With PAM, as the light is a particle, not a wave, it undergoes perfect time dilation.

Thus, transmit time between the moon and earth is instantaneous!

With this idea moderately solidified, we're preparing an aggressive launch schedule, to get that hardware on site!

Starlink receivers will be able to transmit via PAM too... once we've flushed out the tech.

All it will require is a series of future software updates, so buy your Starlink now!

Yesterdays technology. I'm working on light that ignores matter, just beam through the earth.

Who still uses light? I'm all in on neutrinos baby.

Too heavy.

"They could make payments and shipping complicated..."

eg they could outright ban the sale of StarLink products, ya know, being in charge of the laws and all

Reply on news.ycombinator.com