this post was submitted on 03 May 2026
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We need to make it impossible for any group (including governments and corporations) to turn off the internet for another group of people. Everyone deserves to be able to tell the world what's going on in their lives. Especially if what's going on is real bad.
While I agree, I can’t think of a practical way to ensure this beyond direct physical intervention. Which I admit may have been what you meant, but it sounded more like “we need to make it impossible to block the internet at a technical level”.
The best way to do this would be to have an international organization operating something like starlink, but not operated by a nazi, and instead provided for free for everyone.
Unless places like North Korea and Iran start blasting hundreds of satellites out of the sky, there is far less that any country could do to prevent people from making transceivers at home.
The problem is that no such international organization would ever be funded and independent.
So, I get where you’re going with this. There’s a problem with it though, albeit one that shouldn’t necessarily discourage the idea. Starlink and such devices can be found when in use. It’s not a passive connection, you need to send data out.
In fact, I believe an individual was convicted in Iran for using starlink recently?
You’d need a forceful reason for governments to leave the people/connections alone.
Satellite can also be disrupted instead of destroyed. Though that’s admittedly a little difficult to accomplish at the scale of an entire country.
For sure there are still problems with it. But IMO the benefits of such an organization would outweigh any of the drawbacks.
A ton of countries wouldn't go through the effort to block it, it would help those in impoverished areas to connect, etc.
And for those in places that would actively try to stop such a connection, people wouldn't be trying to connect if they didn't find it worth the risk. I heard about the starlink/iran one as well.
I do mean the latter. If not impossible, then as technically and economically infeasible as possible. I think it would be difficult and complicated to implement, and would require multiple layers that mutually cushion against attacks on any one layer. I think an international treaty around satellite internet that stipulates that any person can connect to it would be a start. That of course would be vulnerable to DOS attacks by nation-states or regional powers (which should be defined in the treaty as a crime against humanity), so there would also need to be robust and redundant ground-based networks and reserved citizen-band spectra that supplement the satellite coverage.