Stories from Abroad

China’s internet watchdog, the Cyberspace Administration, instructed tech companies to expand censorship of protests and moved to curb access to virtual private networks, as a government clampdown succeeds in keeping most protesters off the streets after 

Elon Musk’s satellite Starlink technology is to be part of a UK government trial to get better internet connectivity to remote parts of the country. Starlink will initially be trialled at three remote locations—Rievaulx Abbey in North Yorkshire Moors national park, Wasdale Head in the Lake District, and two sites within Snowdonia national park. The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport said it was continuing to look at the capability of the system, as well as looking at other solutions and services with different suppliers.

The list prices of Starlink communications devices have nearly doubled in Ukraine, as mobile networks have started failing under Russia’s assault on the country’s electricity grid and increased demand for the SpaceX-manufactured satellite communication device. Starlink terminals, which are made by Elon Musk-owned SpaceX, will increase in price to $700 for new Ukrainian consumers, according to the company’s website.

Many people in Britain can’t live without their smartphone and use it to manage all aspects of their lives, from banking to shopping and socialising.

Twitter faces a mass of forces abroad and in Washington that aim to compel the company to obey privacy rules, speech limits and other regulations as Elon Musk remakes the service. Musk's word is law inside Twitter now, but his disdain for rules will encounter tough pushback from governments around the world — just as the company has lost most of the people who managed its relationships with regulators and legislators. Twitter's biggest challenges lie abroad, particularly in Europe, which has been steadily tightening tech regulations for years.

Elon Musk’s aerospace business SpaceX has ordered one of the larger advertising packages available from Twitter, the social media business he just acquired in a $44 billion deal and where he is now serving as CEO.

The future-of-tech conversations at Web Summit  in Lisbon could have played on a split screen.

British communications regulator Ofcom said it had started the process to scrap legislation compelling BT, the former state-owned monopoly, to provide dedicated landlines for the devices at affordable prices.

BT networking division Openreach is looking to reduce its broadband prices to attract new customers and lock in big wholesale clients like Vodafone, TalkTalk, and Sky as rivals lay full-fiber cables across the UK. The incumbent network operator, part of BT Group, has met some of its biggest corporate customers to suggest a number of changes to its pricing structure that would make its offer more attractive and help them move customers from copper to full fiber. Openreach makes money by wholesaling its broadband to internet service providers, including its parent group BT.

In Europe, the battle between US Big Tech companies and telecommunications firms has reached a fever pitch. Telecom groups are pushing European regulators to consider implementing a framework where the companies that send traffic along their networks are charged a fee to help fund mammoth upgrades to their infrastructure, something known as the “sender pays” principle. Their logic is that certain platforms, like Amazon Prime and Netflix, chew through gargantuan amounts of data and should therefore foot part of the bill for adding new capacity to cope with the increased strain.