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With the recent news of X being banned in Brazil, it seems we're entering a new stage of the ongoing battle between major, multinational corporations and governments.
A common talking point on the left is that Musk is making a hissy fit out of Brazil, but has been happy in the past to censor for 'outgroup' countries like Turkey, China, et cetera. While I haven't looked into the truth of these claims, I think it's interesting to take them at face value, and ask why that's a problem exactly?
We have clear evidence that Facebook, Insta, Twitter, etc all heavily and not even secretly censored anti-right wing information (and even just true information) during the Covid pandemic especially, but also around other, more political topics.
So in this case, I suppose the question comes down to - if most people on the left think that censoring information during covid and around the 2020 election was fair game, why is it not fair game when someone on the 'other side' does it back to them?
Now personally I think that the censorship around covid was far more egregious, but again I'm hoping to pose a general question about freedom of speech, especially for these incredibly powerful media tech companies. Are we entering an era where elections are mostly decided based on corporate censorship? Are governments going to just cede power to the technarchs gently, or will there be more and more lawfare against them?
I don't think e.g. Brazil can really pressure someone like Musk much, but the battle between him and the EU, as well as the left side of the U.S. government, is certainly worth keeping an eye on.
The balkanization of the internet will continue, and has been since before the arab spring when it became clear social media censorship / influence was a security threat to autocrats, an influence vector for the west, and a basis for competition between the Americans and Europeans when the Europeans identified legislative / regulatory influence over American media companies as both an economic interest (see the attempts by national regulators to charge google news linking to country media groups) and a political influence interest (see the attempts to suppress the right / require political commentary in the name of counter-misinformation). Ever since the Chinese government enforced its own geographic regulatory zone over western internet providers during the early 2000s in the buildup of the great firewall, the ability and interest to construct similar regulator sub-divisions of the internet has been a growing interest across the world.
That said, I think X will 'win' this one, in so much that I don't expect Brazil to effectively cut off access to VPNs or Satellite internet needed to actually block Twitter from the Brazilian information sphere. In addition to Musk being able to write off the loss, Musk is both providing an internet service (X) but is also an internet service provider via Starlink, and even if the current US administration doesn't like Musk politically, it really, really likes the premise of Starlink, which allows access to X, and nothing Brazil will do will outweigh the Americans' interest in bypassing the regulatory firewalls via space network capacity.
Starlink (and the military extension starshield) have direct national security implications for the US government. You can see the direct military application implications in Ukraine, where it has given the Ukrainian substantial network access and military advantages the Russians struggle to degrade, and these are generalizable anywhere the US either wants to operate or wants partners or allies to be able to operate. These capabilities have non-kinetic implications either, such as natural disaster functions when land-based networks may be knocked down, critical infrastructure integration if a cyber-attack takes down land-based network connections, and so on. Starlink's resiliency and ability to survive / mitigate common disruption vectors is much of the point.
But Starlink also counters that balkanization of the internet, as a space-based, US-based, internet provider counters many of those balkanization efforts of regulatory enforcement in a way that the US government wants to happen to other internet-balkanization countries.
Regional internet regulation largely worked against internet service providers when the companies had to be working within infrastructure in the countries doing the regulating. When the company and the country disagreed, it was the company that bore the cost of enforcement, since it could be fined / have its critical infrastructure seized if it was found to violate laws. This is central to, say, the regulatory demands to keep personal data in-country (as opposed to the US)- where the infrastructure is matters. And regional internet regulation makes the companies pay the cost for stepping out of line, either in fees or losing access to the infrastructure.
But Starlink reverses the enforcement cost. Beyond freezing Starlink assets in a country itself, Starlink satellites are literally in outer space. Unless Brazil intends to literally launch a satellite to take down a starlink satellite, it's going to stay in space... and if Brazil were to try that, SpaceX- again owned by Musk- could throw up many more satellites for a fraction of the cost.
That leaves a general country two main avenues.
One is to try and take Starlink to court in the US and have the US enforce a shut-off to the country. This would almost certainly fail because this is the exact sort of scenario of maintaining access to the US internet that the US government wants anti-US countries to be unable to stop. While there are opportunities for the knives to come out for Musk, the ability of anyone in the world to access the US internet regardless of what their own national government wants is something the US has very, very strong incentives to maintain for strategic interest and ideological reasons. The same regulatory logic that allowed other countries to pressure US companies to regulate speech in their own countries is what protects US regulatory pre-eminence in its own market, which just so happens to happens to include it's satellites.
The other option is to go after Starlink / X-VPN users in the country itself. Which is where the enforcement cost starts to add up. Far more intrusive, suppressive, and aggressive governments than Brazil have tried to block satellite dishes and access to global comms, and the costs of doing so are non-trivial both economically and in social-political costs, especially when Starlink offers a service that is exceptionally useful the further away from government-infrastructure you are.
And this is without the internal politics of Brazil coming into play. The Supreme Court judge can ban X and demand fines on people who use VPNs on it, but that's a separate matter from an electorally-sensitive administration actually enforcing such things. It turns out that voters in relatively free democracies tend not to like governments who have huge poverty and crime issues instead sending the police in to check what sort of satellite dish you have. The Brazilian government's electoral margins aren't that strong, and the laxer enforcement is, the more effective X remains at functionally skirting the ban.
How long before authoritarian or neutral countries have their own version of Starlink? The advantages they give, if they're truly as big as you say, seem like they would attract the interest of other state actors to co-opt them. At that point, limiting Starlink is just a matter of banning its terrestrial assets in the country, which is easy enough. Normies can then switch to Chinalink or Indialink or whatever and not be that bothered.
Granted, this might not apply to the current situation, but Musk is playing a dangerous game here by directly incentivizing the creation of competitors.
Starlink is not a trivial undertaking. It's entirely possible that chinalink is outside the realm of possibility.
"Brazil-link" is certainly a stretch...
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