So if the Spanish government were to make a law saying all ISPs must block the following domains for whatever reason, then Starlink must also comply in that jurisdiction or face fines or get booted out, and I don't know many businesses that take pleasure in being in contempt of the courts.
Edit" it looks like the inter-satellite capacity might be able to handle more than I thought
https://mikepuchol.com/modeling-starlink-capacity-843b2387f5...
The ground stations would be a lot more vulnerable, but cutting the cable would be a lot easier than flying a Ku/Ka band jammer overhead.
Spain isn’t large enough, I suspect. But they can lean on starlink as long as they’re sold there.
Businesses exist solely at the pleasure of the state. The state runs the courts; they can invalidate your ability to enforce contracts.
Until and unless they smuggle the dishes into the country like bricks of cocaine and allow subscription payments in bitcoin, local governments can and will regulate Starlink service and users.
That's why Starlink has geofencing in place so they can ensure it operates only in regions they're legally autorized to, it's not some pirate HAM network that can just freely operate while evading local laws willy nilly.
Anyhow, I flicked through the tables for Starlink's Spain IP address blocks and they directly peer with Cloudflare, so short of Starlink agreeing to perform similar blocking itself or worse yet de peering with Cloudflare, I'd expect availability through them.
Satellites aren't, in practice and for the time being, a technological end-run around sovereignty and the practical ability of governments to censor internet access.
It's been discussed on HN before, that even first-world democracies, such as the UK [0,1], feel comfortable enacting laws banning satellite internet.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42979869 ("Starlink in the Falkland Islands – A national emergency situation? (openfalklands.com)", 225 comments)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37645945 ("Saint Helena Island Communications (sainthelenaisland.info)", 145 comments)
The old jokes about aggressive NFL Copyright enforcement would really pale in comparison to Spain developing a mature anti-satellite capability in order to disrupt soccer broadcast piracy at the physical layer.
Is it? I've seen a guy doing it by hand with a YAGI antenna and a little handled radio. But I could see it for many and the phased part. Also people have web models like this one showing the orbits.
Anyway yeah just mental exercise not really arguing for it
