Richard Waters

Elon Musk’s Starlink has activated its satellite broadband service in Iran after the US allowed private companies to offer uncensored internet access to the country amid protests that have caused more than 40 deaths. Starlink is the first in a new generation of satellite networks operating in low-Earth orbit that are designed to provide high-bandwidth internet connections from space directly to individual users. Starlink users are able to bypass a country’s terrestrial communications networks, freeing them from internet censorship.

The internet’s surge protectors have just survived a major convulsion. Hundreds of millions of people have suddenly found themselves working — and movie-watching, game-playing and video-calling — from home throughout the day. The result, according to Matthew Prince, head of internet infrastructure company Cloudflare, has been a spike in demand that would have brought any other public utility to its knees. His company’s network has seen demand rise more than 50 per cent — the kind of spike that “would be a disaster” in a sewer system or electric grid, he said.

According to lobbyists and consumer advocates, the overturning of broadband privacy rules a forerunner to a pair of bigger fights that will shape the US internet and media industries for years to come: the network neutrality regime that sets the ground rules for access to digital communications and media, and approval of AT&T’s $109 billion bid for Time Warner.

The severe retrenchment of FCC power fits with the agenda of Ajit Pai, the Republican-appointed commissioner who took over as chairman of the agency after the election. Chairman Pai has been a vociferous opponent of net neutrality, and has already taken snips out of the regime put in place by the Obama-era FCC to limit the powers of cable and telecoms companies to exert more control over the data flowing through their networks. The shift in direction to unshackle the network companies threatens to reset the competitive landscape, and is shaping up to be a mixed blessing for internet giants like Google and Facebook.

Forty seven years after the first message was sent over the forerunner to today’s pervasive global network, the US has given up its remaining control over the internet. The formal handover, which took effect on Oct 1, followed a last-ditch attempt by a group of Republicans to block the move. They had argued that the US concession would open the door for authoritarian governments to get control of the network of networks, leading to greater censorship. However, supporters of the handover plan maintained that it was the only way to prevent a greater threat to the internet, since foreign governments who resented the US control would end up walling off their own national networks, eventually Balkanising the global system.

On Sept 30, a judge in Texas refused to grant an injunction requested by four Republican state attorneys-general to bar the move. That followed the end of an attempted Congressional rebellion, led by Sen Ted Cruz (R-TX). The last vestige of US control lay in its power over the internet’s naming and addressing system. Though largely technical in nature, this theoretically gave Washington the power to make entire countries “go dark” on the internet by removing them from the central naming system — though such a drastic action was considered self-defeating since it would have led to the immediate fragmentation of the internet. The US concession has officially launched an experiment in global governance designed to handle borderless digital communications. Control over addressing and naming on Oct 1 passed to Icann, an international body that had already been handling the system under a contract from Washington, but now operates independently.