Exactly what I mean. There is no way to have an international network with national borders. Telecommunications providers have always been centralized and have always been in bed with the government. Only way we'll ever be free is if someone invents some kind of decentralized long range wireless mesh network.
Good luck, spectrum is highly regulated in every country I can think of. If national governments don’t want you networking across borders, you’re definitely not going to be broadcasting long range radio transmissions that way. In fact, it’s currently illegal to transmit encrypted data or to relay packets via ham radio in the US.
Who knows? The whole point of decentralization is for there to be so many nodes in the network they can't possibly take them all down so that it's pointless to even try. What if all smartphones formed a mesh network? There aren't enough prisons in my country for all those criminals.
I agree with your ethos, but I don't share your optimism. If the state wants to enforce networking firewalls along national boundaries, no technological solution will save us in general. As a resourceful techie with the right know-how you may be able to sneak your packets through, just like people in Cuba receive a literal packet of data via sneakernet, but if the state doesn't want widespread meshnets circumventing their firewall, they will imprison you for emitting pirate radio signals, they will penalize any electronics manufacturer that makes non-compliant hardware, and rest assured that companies will go right along. Liberty requires more than technical solutions.
I'm saying this as someone who once wrote a decentralized P2P mesh for instant messaging[1]. I was inspired by the HK protests going on ~2014 after hearing that they were using Bluetooth chat apps. Luckily Matrix, Telegram, Signal, etc. mostly solved the problem. Still, I don't think any amount of mesh networking would turn back the tide of Hong Kong now.
>What if all smartphones formed a mesh network? There aren't enough prisons in my country for all those criminals.
There don't need to be. You publicly gruesomely execute the first 100 or so you catch, and the practice of running a mesh node on your cell phone will fall so far out of fashion that the network breaks.
Societal shortcomings cannot be fixed via tech alone. If you can't build a society resilient to authoritarianism in the first place, tech will not help you. It can be used to increase resilience, but that's far from fixing the problem by itself.
Starlink is maintained by a company, it's an internet service provider. One visit from the police and they'll censor anything.
The mesh network should be made out of common hardware in order to be viable. I'd suggest phones but those devices are owned before they've even left the factory.
One visit from the US police. US-unfriendly countries have no leverage over it, and similarly, the US has no leverage over satellite ISPs based in countries they aren't on good terms with.
It's probably easier to just cut off outgoing payments to Starlink anyway. They're not a charity, so if they don't get paid, they probably don't want to provide service just to send a message to some random government.
On the other hand, if you want to demonstrate that you have anti-satellite capability it's probably a better idea to shoot down a corporate satellite than a military one. The Soviet Union shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007 and it didn't start a war, after all.
> It's probably easier to just cut off outgoing payments to Starlink anyway.
Cryptocurrencies might be a problem in this plan, and satellite internet access itself might become a currency (since unlike cryptocurrencies, this one both has almost an intrinsic value and provides its own infrastructure that's very hard to block, where as cryptos rely on external sources of Internet access).
It also depends - drugs have consistently won the war on drugs despite being a physical product that needs a local supply chain and various anti-money-laundering and banking/finance regulations that should make it hard to fund the operation. Satellite internet access is likely to be even easier as it doesn't rely on a physical product (if we reach this stage there's going to be clandestine satellite terminals built locally, so blocking shipments of the real thing isn't going to cut it).
The only solution, apart from North Korea-levels of isolation (and even then, NK has the advantage of their population being isolated & indoctrinated since birth, something most other countries won't achieve even if they turned authoritarian overnight) would be detection followed by harsh punishment, but this has the downside of not only wasting the disclosure of detection capabilities (that are useful to the military) but also outsourcing the R&D of evading such capabilities into the open which enemies will no doubt pick up on too and use against you in a conflict.
IIRC there was mention of it providing some p2p network style communication capabilities for Ukraine's military, and one of the reasons it's appealing to the US's military is the ability to route communications entirely within the network (well, with the gen 2 satellites which have laser interconnects).
So it can (at least eventually) function without 'regular internet', although I would still be hesitant to call it a viable infrastructure choice if the goal is to get around government control, simply from how much SpaceX have to appease the government to do anything space related.
