Net neutrality is not a good thing in and of itself. It is one value among many.

If you're a firefighter trying to call for assistance from base camp, you don't care about net neutrality. You want your emergency phone call to have priority over everything else. You want the net to be extremely non-neutral.

On the general internet, where bandwidth is plentiful, net neutrality can keep certain pathological things from being a thing. On a specialized network where bandwidth is very scarce, it can be the cause of pathology.

> All bets are on centralized and/or proprietary ones that can afford to pay for the privilege

Or not.

App like Silence (https://silence.im/) have been able to do secure e2e messaging using SMS as transport layer for almost one decade now.

SMS makes it very hard to be anonymous. Not a good option IMO.

> SMS makes it very hard to be anonymous. Not a good option IMO.

How is that even related ?

Silence is the equivalent of Signal over SMS instead of the usual Mobile Data: There is nothing by design in Signal to stay anonymous.

E2E encryption are mainly there to prevent eyes dropping, not to provide anonymity.

I was simply pointing out Starlink supporting SMS is not good enough, even with layers like Silence on top.

Good enough for what? If you have SMS where you didn't before you're still equally free to not use it. Personally I like the idea of always having a simple channel for emergencies.

Not good enough to be the only standard form of communication permitted other than a handful of centralized proprietary apps.

A journalist or a dissident may wish to get critical communications out from a remote area without exposing their identity or location.

Then this isn't the solution for them. You keep assuming this is an internet service when it's not. Internet protocols are massively inefficient and have latency constraints that would choke narrow channels while offering almost no utility. This will be a modified SMS service, not a not an IRC service. Don't like it? Go buy an actual satphone with a data plan.

Whose goal is to solve this? Not T-Mobile or SpaceX

When you are the only source of a critical service in an area, you become a utility and should shoulder the responsibilities that come with that.

They don't have a responsibility to help you stay anonymous if they don't promise it. Follow your logic and we wouldn't have remote schooling or medical services over HF radio either. It extends the capabilities of normal phones to provide a feature we didn't have before, so you can't expect the capabilities of full fat, dedicated hardware. It's better than nothing, so why complain? You want net neutrality for a non-Internet service?

A major use case is in emergency situations or catastrophes when no classical cell service is available. If you are hoping to message someone to rescue you, I don't think anonymity is your concern.

Unless you are a journalist or a dissident and need to relay information that will save human lives, but cannot risk exposing your identity, location, or the message content to anyone but the recipients.

Not all emergencies are the same.

At the event they addressed this, and said they would work with anyone, and that the real issue is making sure that the data is correctly identified as messages and not generic data. This apparently would require back-end work between T-Mobile and the messaging app to identify the data in some way.

This is a net neutrality killer any way you look at it as whitelisting apps in any way will by design mean blocking legitimate privacy focused messaging solutions that do not have fixed IP addresses or identifiable traffic patterns.

I somehow doubt for instance they would have a way to allow a federated and often self-hosted messaging protocol like Matrix over an anonymization networking layer like Tor, which is the only chat solution I use.

Breaking net neutrality even a little bit has consequences like creating network effects further favoring centralized solutions forcing vulnerable people like journalists, dissidents, female healthcare seekers, etc, to take on a lot more risk.

If SpaceX has bandwidth limitations they should cap everyone to dialup speeds and keep it neutral.

If they insist on breaking net neutrality, people like me will be forced to do stupid nonsense like piping arbitrary TCP/IP as base64 blobs via chatbots over some whitelisted app like Whatsapp. Or masquerade traffic as port 53 DNS queries like dnstunnel.

Protocol/app whitelisting will most discriminate against those with low technical ability.

We have been down this road.

How? Net neutrality applies to the internet. You could run a private mobile network and allow or disallow anything you want on it. The reason it's bandwidth limited is probably because they're using dedicated SMS/MMS channels, as was field tested and proven earlier. T-mobile will likely write or allow modified chat apps that use these channels. So there's nothing to indicate this would be a limited Internet service. And if you didn't want it your options would be no worse than they are now.

https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/18/lynk-sends-the-first-text-...

I mean, sort of?

I believe they have some sort of similar solution in place for free messaging on in-flight wifi. Having a look at how they've done that might give a better idea for what this will look like than speculation.

Still, it's a hard problem. They want to prioritise connectivity on an extremely low bit-rate channel that covers an extremely large geographic region. Messaging apps needs to be a part of that connectivity solution, but you can't have one user making the entire cell unusable by everybody else. I don't know if there is a 'net neutral' way to do that, but would love to hear your ideas.

I think it is quite simple. Just apply net neutrality rules to this like any other internet connection.

If they can afford to support whitelisted messengers at a very limited data rate of 1k/s then they can afford to simply give people 1k/s of neutral internet access to use to communicate whatever data they feel is high value enough to fit over those constraints using any protocol they wish.

We already have internet access over HAM radio via net44. Highly bandwidth restrictive because of physics, but you can get a permanent IP assigned to your callsign and use whatever software you want with your tiny bandwidth pipe even in the middle of the ocean.

I don't think the speed of text messaging allows for many other meaningful data types. Someone encoding video into the GSM-7 format used by SMS will still consume more data than the typical person typing and sending text messages (which is what, 140 bytes each way per minute on average?).

There is also the difference between free and paid. Sure, if you're paying, you should be able to do whatever you want at the advertised speed and data limits. But for a free feature, I think it's alright to limit to SMS and other texting apps (already done on inflight wifi and it works just fine).

Why not just limit to SMS? Because travelers' home carriers might levy roaming charges on SMS, and WhatsApp / Telegram / iMessage is already de facto in most of the world.

This is exactly why net neutrality rules were a bad idea, because of insane proposals like this that would kill legitimate innovation. If you are lost in the woods without a cell signal, you don't want someone downloading a podcast episode at 1k/s sucking up all the bandwidth.

Maybe they are downloading a low res video demonstrating an emergency field medicine procedure to save a life far from hospitals. Maybe they are a journalist or a whistleblower uploading a picture that may change the outcome of a war.

A central party trying to decide what data is most important is going to be wrong when it counts most.

If a single user is monopolizing all bandwidth and a new user joins, throttle the existing user in half to make room.

There might also need to be a way to signal a need for emergency bandwidth, 911 style, that can give you priority access for a short time window, with the option for a carrier to cut off your device IMEI entirely if it is used too frequently.

In practice though they want to offer bursty throughput. For example, if you want to allow sending photos in messages, but not videos, you don't want to send a photo at 1k/s. It's not a trivial problem.

This is probably just a temporary solution to give everyone SMS capability after the fact - why would you assume this is permanent? Obviously the goal is to get everyone global internet. What happens at that point will determine net neutrality but that is far off into the future.