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It's pretty easy to ignore laws from space.

Reference satellite TV in the middle east. Al-Jazeera is banned in many countries, but still has high penetration as users just ignore the laws.

Saudi Arabia has an outright ban on satellite television... yet 97% of Saudis have access to satellite television. [1]

Iran also bans satellite television, yet more than 70 percent of people Tehran watch banned satellite channels. [2]

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_in_Saudi_Arabia

2. http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/12/19/iranian-min...



It's easy if consumer devices can talk directly to your satellites. AFAIK, this still needs a ground based relay to be of any use to the average person - it's a replacement for transoceanic cables or ISP backbones, not for WiFi.


Depends how expensive the receiver equipment is. Seeing as how this is an LEO constellation and not GEO one, and that internet requires bidirectional communication instead of a pure receiver they'll be more complicated and expensive than satellite TV for sure. I just don't know enough about the current hardware to know if it's within reach of the average consumer.

(BTW, I find it likely that even if the ground stations ate cheap enough to be privately owned, they'll be more like a cable modem than an 802.11 chip - a relatively expensive stationary piece of equipment that you hook up to an 802.{3/11} network in the home.


I imagine it would be easy for them to ignore the individual requirements of countries. But individual users would have to be able to broadcast in order to communicate here, and would therefore be more at risk of being found by authorities - if they can get their hands on the equipment to do so.




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