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Comment by lxgr | Hacker News Reader

> There have been persistent stories in a number of markets of Starlink resellers that set up a service in a country that has the necessary national regulatory approvals to use Starlink and then they ship the dish to a nearby location in a different country.

It's still baffling to me how Starlink is getting away with this.

It makes some sense for the old wide-beam geostationary services, like Inmarsat's legacy services, which are intrinsically hard to geolocate (the satellite beams for tehse cover huge areas and the operator has no technical reason to know where the client is located).

But for Starlink, which has a mandatory GPS receiver in every terminal and which uses spot beams smaller than some rural 5G cells?

Great for people in countries with authoritarian governments limiting their access to information, of course, but somehow I don't feel great about the broader implications on the credibility of international law.

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When I lived in Iran as a foreigner almost 2 decades ago, it was common for foreigners to try to sneak a satellite TV box and receiver in their luggage. They'd arrange payment through someone in their original country, and obtain the dish locally (plus having a local electrician set it up for them).

It was illegal, but for the most part tolerated. Yes, it was just one-way geostationary communication rather than internet access, but it wasn't like people were doing anything special to hide the dishes on their roofs.

I think most authoritarian regimes tend to tolerate some low level violations of these kinds (VPNs were also illegal yet openly sold) in exchange for the public allowing them to stay in power.

With Starlink it probably helps that even the previous administration, despite their conflicts with Musk, turned a blind eye to Starlink being supplied to Iranians even given the Iranian government's protests (IIRC).

The US was probably happy that such freer access to information annoyed the Iranian government.

Autocratic regimes also do still have to care what the populace thinks, it's just that the thresholds are totally different. They can get torn apart by widespread revolt even if they cannot be voted out of power, and most autocratic regimes spend a lot of time in fear of just this sort of threat. In other words, they pick their battles, and some of these low level violations might not make sense to crack down on broadly, unless the regime really, really cares about the issue. (eg: the hijab in Iran)

It's also the case that if nearly everyone is breaking some minor law then nearly everyone is vulnerable, which could also be a more comfortable place for such a regime. Even if this is not the intent behind the current permissiveness, this fact might help keep it in place all the same.

Authoritarian regimes PREFER that most of their citizens are in violation of some small, stupid, or obviously nonsense law.

It gives people false confidence of "well sure it's horrible on paper but nobody goes to jail for that"

It releases some of the pressure from such oppressive regimes

If you ever want to crack down on it, your supporters can lean on the "but but but it's always been the law" apologetics (see illegally deporting people suspected of being illegal aliens)

And the best reason of all, if everyone is violating a law, you have carte blanche to attack anyone you want with the full force of the law. You aren't arresting that annoying Journalist or Politician for their speech or views, you are putting a criminal in jail!

>see illegally deporting people suspected of being illegal aliens

That's not an example of something that "most [...] citizens are in violation" of. In fact, 0% of US citizens are in violation of that.

Then maybe we should rewrite the international laws accordingly.

The whole idea of "a country owns its radio waves" hasn't held in practice for, basically, the entire history of radio waves.

And I don't think the tech companies are very trustworthy - but I'd trust many of them with power before I would trust a lot of the governments. Google is quite open about being evil now, but I'd still trust Google before I trust the governments of Saudi Arabia or Sudan.

Except you can't: countries exercise the monopoly on violence within their borders, and that specific detail delineates most other powers: e.g. if they want to setup and run high power jamming on their territory, then to stop them would take an act of war.

So in practice the agreements we make essentially cover making reasonable concessions so no one feels the need to start bombing things.

There are significant amounts of soft power between countries before it comes to physical force.

For example, how I'd have expected this to play out in an age that feels more and more a thing of the past:

- Country A's ingenious startup offers global satellite service, bypassing country B's telecom monopoly, without even fully registering it. (They employ more engineers than lawyers.)

- Country B complains to country A's government.

- Government A respects B's sovereignty, even though A is much larger and more powerful than B, and wants to reassure the world that the same rules apply to everybody. It slaps the startup on its wrist, under the (very implicit, never even hinted at) threat of further regulatory or legal action. (The startup pays taxes in A, and its executives live and can be arrested there.)

- The startup stops providing service on B's territory.

- The governments of A and B sit down together and negotiate, behind closed doors and without making it a big display of power, a deal that works for both of them, e.g. granting the startup access to the market of B, in exchange for complying with local regulations.

Obviously it has never worked like that between all countries and in all cases, but I'm just saying, this used to be seen as a desirable model by many.

> then to stop them would take an act of war.

Or a covert act of war disguised as local domestic terrorism.

Which part are you upset about? This all sounds positive.

I'm not exactly upset, but I have a somewhat uneasy feeling about how a foreign private company can seemingly walk all over national and international law like that and get away with it. (SpaceX isn't exactly an NGO or hacker/ham collective.)

Sure, it currently seems to lead to good outcomes in my eyes (democracy and access to information > most alternatives), but what if it one day does not? Trust in laws and international agreements is, like all trust, gained in drops and lost in buckets.

The company is not "walking all over national and international laws", the citizens are. The company is simply not enforcing those laws as strictly as it could.

In practice, laws are only as effective as a government's willingness to use its monopoly on violence to enforce them.

The international treaties state that SpaceX, the company not the users, shall not broadcast into countries without permission. When SpaceX, the company not the users, does that they are trampling all over the law.

yeah, it's like exporting guns from US knowing it's going to locally-illegal hands. Maybe not as bad as guns, more like alcohol to a highly religious country, but still. The destination countries kind of has full rights to prosecute personnel involved, should they ever fly there.

They don't care because their employees are never going to fly to those [whatever series of expletives] countries, and that's not um ... not nice.

What if it's maybe not as bad as alcohol, more like dropping food into a country that tries to deprive its citizens of food?

There's no leverage for the countries without Starlink business to use against Starlink other than blocking future approval (unlikely to start with in those blocking it because it can bypass their information filtering) so they can only go after the customers who are harder to track down than detecting the downlink signal.

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