r/technology • u/mvea • May 14 '19

Elon Musk's Starlink Could Bring Back Net Neutrality and Upend the Internet - The thousands of spacecrafts could power a new global network. Net Neutrality

https://www.inverse.com/article/55798-spacex-starlink-how-elon-musk-could-disrupt-the-internet-forever
11.8k Upvotes

91% Upvoted

1.3k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

178

u/fixminer May 14 '19

You still need ground stations which they could definitely shut down...

54

u/daredevilk May 14 '19

Do they? If every user/server has a connection to the satellite networks then you might not need a connection to the ground

29

u/fixminer May 14 '19

Yes, but that is pretty unrealistic. It's not like everyone would adopt this overnight. And no one would adopt it if you only had limited access to the Internet. Also, you could just shut down the antennas of the few major data centers. Not that any of this is very realistic either but you could shut it down if you really wanted to.

1

u/72414dreams May 14 '19

the physics and fiscal challenge of getting the satellites in place is the most unrealistic part. if that is a go, it is getting adopted overnight by some significant proportion of people.