Current mitigations (visorsat) by SpaceX already make the satellites completely invisible to the naked eye. It’s less of a visual impact (zero once deployed) than any other visible LEO satellite or air travel. Celltowers high enough to need a light are highly visible and are a much greater visual impact than Starlink.
Most of sub-saharan Africa has slow and expensive internet. I would guess there is 1 billion people who will have access to the internet via mobile tower with starlink & competitors backhaul in a few years. This is enormous.
There's nothing in the landscape that prevents Africa from running fiber to every house like Eastern Europe has been proven to be capable of. In fact, a lot of infrastructure is already there. Geopolitical instability, poverty and instability of the power grid makes it very unattractive to build data centers in the continent and that's what's forcing ISPs to use expensive cables to access most websites, driving up the cost and reducing the speed.
This problem can be partially mitigated by using StarLink instead of oceanic cables, but I don't imagine their system will be able to replace the fiber optics that carry most large volumes of data between governments. StarLink is fast, but still depends on ground stations for decent speed internet access. Collecting internet traffic for one entire continent on another isn't feasible in the plans I've seen.
StarLink will reduce latency and improve coverage for customers already using satellite internet connections. African people can already use those if they have the means to afford it, yet many African cities have dial-up or slower internet access because of the lack of resources.
Has any nation ever successfully outlawed satellite reception? The roofs of buildings even in nations like Iran and KSA are studded with dishes.
Musk has already admitted that providing satellite services to countries like China can become a problem [3]. Countries that don't want StarLink and don't have the capabilities to take out LEO satellites might start to team up with China, Russia and other countries that do to protect their sovereignty.
Of course there's no way to prevent hardware that someone managed to sneak in from connecting to the satellites. Those devices will all need to come from the black market though, severely limiting the reach and future business StarLink might have in such a country.
[1]: http://www.gard.no/web/updates/content/26690148/ban-on-use-o...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_phone#Countries_with...
[3]: https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-internet-satellite-co...
Perhaps in the US, but other countries, even poor ones, manage to do rural internet fine without cluttering the night sky.
I, for one, am not stoked about the implications of an American ISP forcing worldwide coverage for themselves. Their shady business practices and the questionable reliability of the US government make it very hard for me to see many upsides.
Were this to be released only in remote areas and third-world countries, I would agree that there is a large net benefit to Starlink. However, because of the way the system is designed, every country on the planet will now be forced to deal with a solution for the anti-competitive behaviour of the American ISP market.
As long as Starlink is managed by a an American company, I have little faith in their intends and purposes. Being able to intercept or duplicate random internet communications worldwide seems like an NSA wet dream come true to me.