Starlink is maintained by a company, it's an internet service provider. One visit from the police and they'll censor anything.

The mesh network should be made out of common hardware in order to be viable. I'd suggest phones but those devices are owned before they've even left the factory.

One visit from the US police. US-unfriendly countries have no leverage over it, and similarly, the US has no leverage over satellite ISPs based in countries they aren't on good terms with.

> US-unfriendly countries have no leverage over it

"Star Wars Episode 10: The one that's not fiction."

Internet censorship isn't worth going to war over and disclosing secret anti-satellite weapons that are better saved for a rainy day.

It's probably easier to just cut off outgoing payments to Starlink anyway. They're not a charity, so if they don't get paid, they probably don't want to provide service just to send a message to some random government.

On the other hand, if you want to demonstrate that you have anti-satellite capability it's probably a better idea to shoot down a corporate satellite than a military one. The Soviet Union shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007 and it didn't start a war, after all.

> It's probably easier to just cut off outgoing payments to Starlink anyway.

Cryptocurrencies might be a problem in this plan, and satellite internet access itself might become a currency (since unlike cryptocurrencies, this one both has almost an intrinsic value and provides its own infrastructure that's very hard to block, where as cryptos rely on external sources of Internet access).

It also depends - drugs have consistently won the war on drugs despite being a physical product that needs a local supply chain and various anti-money-laundering and banking/finance regulations that should make it hard to fund the operation. Satellite internet access is likely to be even easier as it doesn't rely on a physical product (if we reach this stage there's going to be clandestine satellite terminals built locally, so blocking shipments of the real thing isn't going to cut it).

The only solution, apart from North Korea-levels of isolation (and even then, NK has the advantage of their population being isolated & indoctrinated since birth, something most other countries won't achieve even if they turned authoritarian overnight) would be detection followed by harsh punishment, but this has the downside of not only wasting the disclosure of detection capabilities (that are useful to the military) but also outsourcing the R&D of evading such capabilities into the open which enemies will no doubt pick up on too and use against you in a conflict.

Starlink connects to standard internet gateways on the ground. It cannot function without the 'regular internet', unless a replacement appears.

IIRC there was mention of it providing some p2p network style communication capabilities for Ukraine's military, and one of the reasons it's appealing to the US's military is the ability to route communications entirely within the network (well, with the gen 2 satellites which have laser interconnects).

So it can (at least eventually) function without 'regular internet', although I would still be hesitant to call it a viable infrastructure choice if the goal is to get around government control, simply from how much SpaceX have to appease the government to do anything space related.