if you have a large portion of the population running these dishes, it's game over.
A counter example is the CCP backing down from the Covid restrictions under popular pressure. If enough people put pressure, the government will react.
> Dictators will massacre their own people
You have to be reminded that the government (and the army) are themselves made of the people. This has the interesting consequences that the most brutal ones are actually oil-funded (because they can outsource security) or countries that have a racial/cultural divide (because they can rally one segment of the population against another, ie: Syria).
Mao did kill off millions in the Great Leap, with no dissent.
Mass starvation.
Source: I worked for a company that had an office in China, and was responsible for maintaining the Chinese servers. In that case, I had to troubleshoot multi-hour MySQL replication lags. Solved by switching the TCP implementation to BBR, because it is resistant to packet loss.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1000_Years_of_Joys_and_Sorro...
The solution is not technical. My dad had a TV sat dish during the communist regime. He was scheduled to be arrested in '90, but the regime fell during the winter of the previous year.
Until you jam the uplinks. Laser I/O could solve that problem, but that opens the door to blinding overhead birds.
It is illegal to bring them into the country, and if you get caught doing so it's jail time. That is true today of drones and any sat communication system in many, many countries.
Even in North Korea, this process takes place. It's just that much slower and riskier, and when lots of controls are slapped on people become too destitute to buy product. But the letter of the law is ultimately just a "threat" in your SWOT analysis when you're able to tempt people with personal gain.
What good governance ultimately does is to enable everyone's indifference on these matters: the rules are out in the open, nobody's keeping secrets and blackmailing their rivals, and the result is sufficiently fair that going against it is a position only a tiny minority are inclined to take. Once everyone's in circumlocutions about their actual position because the politics have gotten out of hand, you have the kind of confusing, hysterical mess that would move someone to turn off the Internet rather than let any more rumors spread.
Thus, this kind of tech - anything in the realm of decentralized communications - is easiest to access in the places of the world that need it the least.
I drove my own vehicle across the land borders into Mauritania, Mali, Nigeria, Cameroon, Congo, DRC, Angola, Burundi, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Sudan, Egypt and about 40 more countries.
You DO NOT want to bring sat communication equipment into countries where it is strictly prohibited.
Some of those countries won't even let you bring 2-way radios in (military tech)
This is hyperbole. A dictator might have the tools to shut off a couple of dissident. But if you have a large portion of the population running these dishes, it's game over.
> Most people are bootlickers. Most people want the type of power structure that ends up with the internet blocked. They don't want freedom - they want to be on the side doing the oppressing.
That's a bit contradictory to what you said a few sentences before. Most people like to be the oppressors but not oppressed.