On Tue, Mar 1, 2022 at 10:38 AM Crist Clark <cjc+nanog@pumpky.net> wrote:
So they’re going to offer the service to anyone in a denied area for free somehow? How do you send someone a bill or how do they pay it if you can’t do business in the country?
It's not like Google is billing anyone for using 8.8.8.8 et al. [for those who immediately respond "this is SpaceX, not Google, remember, Google already put a billion dollars into the company to purchase 10% ownership of it; contributing another billion to fund service to Ukraine wouldn't be beyond their means by any stretch.] Besides, it could be a great "free now, but 6 months after an armistice is signed, you can cancel the service and return the dish, or start paying our regular monthly service fee" type situation. I mean, if starlink offered you free service for N months, and then at the end, you had to choose to return the dish or start paying the monthly fee, how likely are you to give it up once you've gotten used to using it every day? If we really want to get creative, there's always the carbon offsets model for industry. We could create incentive structures for global companies to buy "democracy credits" through donations like that, which would offset a similar amount of latitude in doing business within authoritarian regions. That way, if you donate a billion dollars worth of service to support freedom and democracy in Ukraine, we'll collectively look the other way if you use slave Uyghur labour to assemble a billion dollars worth of CPE. In short--there's lots of ways this could work out, beyond a simple "let's just give it away for free forever" model. ^_^ Matt