Elon Musk-controlled satellite internet provider Starlink has told Brazil’s telecom regulator Anatel it will not comply with a court order to block social media platform X in the country until its local accounts are unfrozen.
Anatel confirmed the information to Reuters on Monday after its head Carlos Baigorri told Globo TV it had received a note from Starlink, which has more than 200,000 customers in Brazil, and passed it onto Brazil’s top court.
Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes last week ordered all telecom providers in the country to shut down X, which is also owned by billionaire Musk, for lacking a legal representative in Brazil.
The move also led to the freezing of Starlink’s bank accounts in Brazil. Starlink is a unit of Musk-led rocket company SpaceX. The billionaire responded to the account block by calling Moraes a “dictator.”
Maybe to add a bit of general context to this, I am not an astronomer but I work in an adjacent field. So I hear a lot of astronomers talk about their work both in private and public.
You don’t really hear them talk about satellites often. What from what I gather really wrecks astronomy is light pollution, which has been doubling every few years for a while now and is basically caging optical astronomy to a select few areas.
The worst thing for astronomy in the last century has probably, ironically, been the invention of the LED.
The satellite streak thing is probably a minor point, where newspapers caught some justified ranting of astronomers and blew it way out of proportion.