Starlink Works Across National Borders. Is That a Good Thing?

A truly libertarian internet may be here — for better and worse.

At first glance, satellite internet looks like just another generation of the same thing we’ve come to know, love and sometimes hate. First we had dial-up, then DSL, and then we got 4G LTE almost everywhere. And soon we’ll have satellites, truly everywhere.

But dig a little deeper and complex questions bloom. If satellite internet can go beyond boundaries, it can go beyond government control. Do we want the internet outside the control of elected governments?

And if we do: then who governs it?

While writing last week’s post about Starlink’s introduction to remote Amazon tribes in Brazil and Colombia, I realized the fundamental shift satellites may make to the internet’s place in the world. And especially, its regulation by national governments.

Up until recently, internet provision has depended on the installation of physical, terrestrial infrastructure within close range of the customers being served. It’s therefore come under easy scrutiny of government licensure and control. Even internet infrastructure not technically bound to the ground — like Google’s Loon balloons, and the internet drone companies both Google and Facebook briefly launched — still required government permission to operate. Frequently this permission also hinged on partnerships with entrenched telecommunications companies, often themselves subsidiaries of national governments.

And because many of these projects flew in the air — and could, at least in theory, interfere with airplanes — they required regulatory approval not only from governments’ FCC-like communications authorities, but also from FAA-like airspace counterparts. Years ago I met Anna Prouse, featured in that Uganda article as Loon’s Head of Government Relations. I’d expected her job to be glamorous, thrilling — jetsetting around the world, meeting with high-level government officials. But she rapidly convinced me it was in fact incredibly dull. She was jetsetting, sure. But then waiting countless hours, in a jetlagged fog, to meet with government and telecom industry bureaucrats. And then pleading, meeting with bureaucrats, and waiting more.

I skipped over this in my post about sexy moonshot internet projects. But I believe it's another big reason all the drones, balloons and more never really took off. Governments, especially in the Global South, are notoriously slow. And if there’s a single Kryptonic word in all of Silicon Valley, “slow” is it.

A PSA poster at a Bangkok BTS Skytrain stop.

Starlink has recently become available in Nigeria and Mozambique, including in some rural Nigerian villages. It’s easy to imagine those communities grappling with the same challenges of coming freshly online as are the Marubo in Brazil we discussed last week.

But many other governments haven’t approved Starlink, and warn providers of fines if they offer services before the government allows them. At least Ghana, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Senegal have issued warnings against the sale and use of Starlink, and it’s easy to imagine other governments doing the same if they feel threatened by the company’s services.

While some examples of “unsanctioned” internet use can surely be found prior to today, it’s hard to imagine these dramatically taking off. Sure, a clever Chinese citizen might find a way to connect to the country’s internet network without paying a local provider. But without a VPN, they’ll still be using the Chinese internet behind the “Great Firewall,” subject to the same censorship and surveillance as everyone else.

But satellite internet isn’t necessarily beholden to these same forces,. Anyone on earth within the satellite’s range can, at least at a technical level, use it — whether or not their government wants them to. As the New York Times reported last year, Musk “alone can decide to shut down Starlink internet access for a customer or country, and he has the ability to leverage sensitive information that the service gathers.” 

Already, Starlink has restricted access multiple times during the Ukraine war, “affecting battlefield strategy.” The service has been used by activists in Iran and Turkey, a hospital in Gaza, paramilitaries in Sudan, and even Houthi rebels in Yemen. 

And the company recently launched Starlink Mini, an incredibly portable, low-power means for connecting to the satellite network by anyone in range.

At a busy market in Lagos, Nigeria.

On the surface, it’s hard to see any problems in this. It sounds freeing, liberating — as libertarian a vision of the internet as many have clung to since its inception.

But this raises some thorny questions. Suddenly, Starlink can circumvent the will of national governments. We may cheer for this when those governments are autocratic, when they have good reason to restrict citizens’ internet freedoms. But it’s something of an anomaly for a single private company — and in this case, a private individual — to wield so much power on the global stage. To decide, regardless of a government’s stance, whether and how its citizens can access the internet. 

And of course, “access to the internet” today means “access to almost everything” — finance, commerce, news, entertainment, communication, and more.

Let’s imagine Elon Musk chooses not to block TikTok if the company fails to strike a deal with the Biden administration before the January 19, 2025 deadline. It’s uncertain what the US government would do in this situation.

Perhaps the FTC would slap Starlink with a fine? I’m likely missing something, but I don’t think the government could block the satellite internet service altogether, even if they disagree with the company’s choices. The satellites are already up in the air. Maybe people set up Starlink Minis to access it, and maybe the company sells “worldwide” subscriptions to US users to ensure continued access. Maybe this doesn’t exactly happen, but it’s easy to see how Starlink’s corporate decisions spin quickly away from the government’s ability to do anything about them.

Many would cheer this move, just as we do Starlink bringing unfettered internet access to citizens whose governments don’t want it. But how comfortable should we feel with one company — one man — holding the power to build, and withhold, critical national infrastructure outside the rule of law?

Outside the *durable* phone store in Lagos, Nigeria.

In his book The Great Firewall of China, James Griffiths explains the nascent risk of cyber-sovereignty, a notion especially pushed by China, Russia, and other autocratic regimes wishing to censor, monitor, and control the internet within their borders. (Though the US “Tiktok Ban” bill suggests otherwise, the US and EU have historically pushed overwhelmingly against this idea.)

The details get technical and wonky in a hurry, but here’s an idea of it:

“Cyber-sovereignty seeks to establish an international, as opposed to global, internet. Instead of the world wide web as we know it, countries would each maintain their own national internet, by force if necessary, with the border controls and immigration standards they see fit. The doctrine risks turning the entire world into China, where people use a mirror image of the internet, resembling that outside the Great Firewall, but skewed and misshapen. Within the Firewall, buttressed by legions of censors and protectionist laws, Chinese internet users search on Baidu rather than Google, they share news and photos on WeChat, not Facebook, and shop with Alibaba, not Amazon. As Lu Wei, then the head of China’s state information office and the country’s top censor, told guests at a Lunar New Year banquet in 2015, ‘Only through my own proper management of my own internet, [and] your own proper management of your own internet … can the online space be truly safe, more orderly and more beautiful’….

The internet was not built with physical geography in mind, nor did its early boosters have much time for states or borders. Speaking in February 1996, Nicholas Negroponte, co-founder of the MIT Media Lab and an early investor in Wired magazine, echoed a widely held consensus when he said the internet ‘cannot be regulated’. ‘It’s not that laws aren’t relevant, it’s that the nation state is not relevant,’ he told a conference in Bonn, Germany. ‘Cyberlaw is, by nature, global and we’re not very good at global law.’”

One might think that satellite internet is the solution we’ve all been waiting for. But Griffiths emphasizes the need for some sort of internet governance, even if it’s truly global. Which, as Nicholas Negroponte correctly pointed out nearly thirty years ago, “we’re not very good at.”

A Cold Stone Creamery — in a shopping mall in Ibadan, Nigeria.

As the New York Times reports, 

“Taiwan, which has an internet infrastructure that could be vulnerable in the event of a Chinese invasion, is reluctant to use the [Starlink] service partly because of Mr. Musk’s business links to China, Taiwanese and American officials said.

China has its own concerns. Mr. Musk said last year that Beijing sought assurances that he would not turn Starlink on inside the country, where the internet is controlled and censored by the state. In 2020, China registered with an international body to launch 13,000 internet satellites of its own.

The European Union, partly driven by misgivings about Starlink and Mr. Musk, also earmarked 2.4 billion euros, or $2.6 billion, last year to build a satellite constellation for civilian and military use.

“This is not just one company, but one person,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, a cybersecurity expert who co-founded the Silverado Policy Accelerator think tank and has advised governments on satellite internet. “You are completely beholden to his whims and desires.”

Recent research suggests all these satellite launches are terrible for the ozone layer, too. This should serve, if nothing else, as a reminder that “we’re not good at global governance,” whether it’s the internet or climate catastrophe.

And in perhaps an ironic twist, Starlink’s satellites could, over the long term, actually catalyze an internet future with greater cyber sovereignty. The EU has emphasized its own satellite internet plans will constitute a “sovereign” constellation, and when Starlink provided internet to protestors in Iran — against their government’s wishes — the country’s Minister of Foreign Affairs called the move a “violation of Iran’s sovereignty.”

We may not love our government’s choices — but at least they’re our government’s. They are, at least in principle, beholden to the wishes of voters, working in the interest of a country’s citizens. Not those of some guy wanting to curry favor with one leader or another.

If we’re okay ceding government control over the internet, then what takes its place? Even at the deep, wonky level, there are important choices to be made around how the internet operates — choices that impact privacy, security, the free (or unfree) flow of information, and more.

It strikes me that this whole dilemma might serve as an illustration of libertarianism at large. If governance is the problem, it’s tempting to want to minimize it. And this might seem fine, until one ambitious strongman punches up into power. 

And maybe we like what he’s doing at first. But what happens when we don’t? 

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Song of the Week: Valerie June — You and I (Moon and Stars / Acoustic)