Starlink Operates in 142 Countries. Sixteen Governments Cannot Switch It Off.

At 11:47 p.m. on February 24, 2022, Mykhailo Fedorov sat in a basement office in Kyiv as Russian missiles struck the Ukrainian capital's telecommunications infrastructure. The deputy prime minister sent a tweet. It was addressed to Elon Musk: "While you try to colonize Mars — Russia try to occupy Ukraine! While your rockets successfully land from space — Russian rockets attack Ukrainian civil people! We ask you to provide Ukraine with Starlink stations."

Forty-eight hours later, truckloads of terminals arrived. Within a week, Ukrainian forces were coordinating drone strikes and artillery using a satellite network operated by a private American company. The terminals kept working even as conventional infrastructure burned. They restored connectivity to hospitals, allowed displaced families to find each other, and gave commanders real-time battlefield awareness. Starlink had become, overnight, critical national infrastructure for a country at war.

The thing is, no treaty, no national law, and no international body had any say in that decision. Musk made it alone. And what he gave, he could take away. In October 2022, when Ukrainian forces attempted to use Starlink-enabled drones against the Russian Black Sea Fleet in occupied Crimea, SpaceX quietly geofenced the service. The operation failed. The U.S. Department of Defense, which had been paying for some of those terminals, learned about the restriction after the fact.

This is the paradox at the heart of the new space economy. A single company now operates more satellites than all governments combined, provides critical connectivity in 142 countries, and has become infrastructure that nations depend on but cannot control. There is no regulatory framework for this. There are no international norms. And the man who holds the switch is accountable to no one but his shareholders.

What the Satellites Make Possible

As of May 2026, SpaceX has launched 5,874 Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit. That is more than every other active satellite constellation combined. The network can deliver broadband internet to any point on Earth between 58 degrees north and south latitude—which covers 95 percent of the human population. In regions with functioning terrestrial infrastructure, Starlink is a luxury good for remote workers and yacht owners. In regions without it, the network has become something else entirely: a geopolitical weapon.

Dr. Juliana Suess, a space security researcher at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, spent two years mapping how governments use—and try to control—satellite internet services. She found that sixteen national governments have attempted to block or restrict Starlink access since 2021. All sixteen failed. "Authoritarian regimes have spent decades perfecting control over terrestrial internet infrastructure," Suess told me from her office in Berlin. "Starlink makes that infrastructure obsolete. You cannot cut a fiber-optic cable that does not exist. You cannot block a signal coming from 340 miles overhead without shutting down GPS, weather satellites, and your own military communications."

Iran discovered this in September 2022, when protests erupted after the death of Mahsa Amini. The government shut down mobile internet nationwide. Activists began smuggling Starlink terminals across the border from Iraqi Kurdistan. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps tried jamming the signals. The jamming equipment interfered with Tehran's own air traffic control. Within three weeks, authorities pivoted to a different strategy: they announced that anyone caught with a Starlink terminal would face ten years in prison. The terminals kept operating. The government arrested 127 people. The network stayed live.

Russia had a different problem. In March 2023, Ukrainian forces pushed into contested areas of Zaporizhzhia Oblast using Starlink terminals to coordinate movements. Russian electronic warfare units detected the signals and attempted localized jamming. The jamming worked—but it also disabled Russia's own GLONASS military positioning system in the affected areas, blinding artillery units. A leaked Russian Ministry of Defense memo from May 2023, obtained by the investigative outlet Proekt, described Starlink as "a connectivity system we can detect but cannot disable without operational cost to our own forces."

The Geopolitical Leverage

Here is what this means in practice: a private company now controls infrastructure that can determine the outcome of wars, enable or suppress protests, and make governments dependent on a service they cannot regulate. And because the satellites are owned by a U.S. corporation, every geofencing decision becomes, implicitly, an extension of American foreign policy—except the State Department has no veto power.

This became starkly visible in Sudan. When civil war erupted in April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, both sides knocked out telecommunications infrastructure in Khartoum within days. The United Nations and humanitarian organizations lost contact with field staff. Then someone—it remains unclear who—brought in Starlink terminals. Humanitarian agencies began using them to coordinate refugee movements. So did both warring factions.

By November 2023, Sudanese Armed Forces commanders were publicly complaining that RSF units were using Starlink to coordinate attacks. The government demanded SpaceX shut down service. SpaceX did not respond. Sudan is not on SpaceX's official list of approved countries—meaning the terminals operating there were either smuggled, activated using foreign billing addresses, or sold through gray-market resellers. The U.S. State Department told Reuters it "does not control private company decisions." The fighting continued. The terminals kept working.

The same dynamic has played out in Myanmar, where resistance forces fighting the military junta have relied on Starlink to maintain communications after the junta shut down mobile networks. In Yemen, where the Houthi movement controls telecommunications in Sana'a, Saudi-backed forces use Starlink terminals. In Gaza, where Israel controls all telecommunications infrastructure, both Israeli forces and international journalists have used the network. In every case, the decision about who gets connectivity and who does not rests with SpaceX, not with any government or international body.

The Regulatory Vacuum

The reason this is possible is simple: there is no law that says it cannot be. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which remains the foundational document of space law, was written when satellites were the size of cars and cost tens of millions of dollars to launch. It establishes that nations bear responsibility for the activities of their private companies in space, but it does not define what those responsibilities are. It certainly does not contemplate a scenario in which a single company could deploy a constellation larger than all government satellites combined.

National regulators have tried to fill the gap, with limited success. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission licenses Starlink's spectrum use and orbital slots, but it has no authority over what countries receive service. The International Telecommunication Union, a UN body, coordinates satellite frequencies to prevent interference, but it has no enforcement mechanism and no jurisdiction over service provision. The result is a system in which SpaceX is, effectively, its own regulator.

Jessica West, a senior researcher at Project Ploughshares, has tracked the regulatory response across forty-three countries. "What we are seeing is governments realizing they have become dependent on a service they cannot control," she told me. "But the regulatory tools they have were designed for a different era. Spectrum licensing does not give you authority over who gets turned on or off. Export controls do not work when terminals are the size of a pizza box and can be carried in a backpack. And international law moves at the pace of diplomacy, while the satellites move at 17,000 miles per hour."

Some nations have attempted novel legal strategies. Brazil's telecommunications regulator, Anatel, required SpaceX to register as a local company and obtain a service license before activating terminals. It worked—until terminals began entering the country through Paraguay and Bolivia, where no such requirement exists. In September 2024, when Brazil's Supreme Court ordered the suspension of X (formerly Twitter), also owned by Musk, for failing to comply with content moderation orders, the court also froze Starlink's Brazilian bank accounts. SpaceX threatened to shut down service. The government backed down. The accounts were unfrozen.

The Debris Crisis

The concentration of control is not the only problem. The sheer number of satellites is creating a traffic management crisis that no one is equipped to handle. In January 2026, a defunct Chinese weather satellite passed within 20 meters of a Starlink unit over the Indian Ocean. The close approach was detected by the U.S. Space Force's 18th Space Defense Squadron, which sent an automated warning to both operators. China's space agency responded within twelve minutes. SpaceX's satellites are equipped with autonomous collision avoidance, which fired thrusters to move the spacecraft. No collision occurred. But the incident revealed how close the margins have become.

Dr. Moriba Jah, an astrodynamicist at the University of Texas at Austin, runs AstriaGraph, a platform that tracks satellite conjunctions—close approaches that could lead to collisions. His data shows that Starlink satellites are involved in approximately 1,600 conjunction events per week that require evasive maneuvers. That is more than double the rate from two years ago. "We have built a system where a single operator generates more collision risk than the rest of the space industry combined," Jah said. "And we have no regulatory mechanism to say 'this is too much, slow down.'"

The European Space Agency attempted to address this through voluntary coordination. In 2023, ESA proposed a "traffic management protocol" under which all satellite operators would share trajectory data and coordinate maneuvers through a central clearinghouse. Twenty-three operators signed on. SpaceX did not. The company's position, articulated in a letter to the ITU in March 2024, is that its automated collision avoidance system is more reliable than human coordination. ESA scientists privately disagree, but they have no mechanism to compel compliance.

The Uncomfortable Precedent

What makes SpaceX's dominance particularly striking is that it is not unique. China is building its own mega-constellation. Guowang, a state-owned entity, has regulatory approval to launch 12,992 satellites. The first 412 are already in orbit. The system is designed to operate entirely within Chinese regulatory control, which means the Chinese government will have the same unilateral authority over connectivity that Musk currently exercises. Russia has announced plans for a 600-satellite constellation called Sfera. The United Kingdom, the European Union, India, and Saudi Arabia have all announced plans for sovereign satellite networks.

The result, according to a 2025 RAND Corporation study on space governance, is a fragmentation of the orbital environment into spheres of influence, each controlled by a different state or corporation, with no overarching framework for coordination. "We are recreating the geopolitics of the Cold War, but in orbit," the study concluded. "And we are doing it at a pace that outstrips our ability to write the rules."

Some researchers argue that the market will self-correct. If orbital space becomes too congested, insurance costs will rise, and launches will slow. But insurance only works if collisions are rare. A single catastrophic collision—say, between a Starlink satellite and a Chinese military spacecraft—could produce thousands of debris fragments, each capable of destroying other satellites. This is known as the Kessler Syndrome, named after NASA physicist Donald Kessler, who theorized in 1978 that a collision cascade could render entire orbital shells unusable.

"The thing people do not understand about Kessler Syndrome is that it does not require intent," Dr. Jah said. "It just requires density. And we are adding density faster than we are removing it." SpaceX's satellites are designed to deorbit at end-of-life, burning up in the atmosphere within five years. But that assumes the satellites remain functional. A dead satellite with no propulsion becomes debris. As of April 2026, 147 Starlink satellites have failed in orbit and are drifting unpowered, according to tracking data from the U.S. Space Force.

What We Still Don't Know

The deeper question is not technological but political: who decides? In the terrestrial world, critical infrastructure is regulated. Water utilities cannot shut off service arbitrarily. Power companies operate under public service obligations. Telecommunications carriers are common carriers, required to serve all customers without discrimination. These rules exist because societies decided that certain services are too essential to be left entirely to market forces.

Satellite internet has reached that threshold. It is now critical infrastructure for Ukraine's defense, for humanitarian operations in Sudan, for rural connectivity in dozens of countries. But it is regulated like a luxury service, because the law has not caught up to the reality. And the longer the gap persists, the harder it becomes to close.

Dr. Suess has been working with European policymakers on a proposed "Space Services Regulation" that would classify satellite internet as critical infrastructure and require operators to meet public service obligations. The proposal has support from France, Germany, and the Netherlands. It has gone nowhere. "The problem is jurisdiction," Suess said. "SpaceX is a U.S. company. The satellites are licensed by the FCC. The service is global. Which regulator has authority? And if we pass a European law that SpaceX ignores, what is our enforcement mechanism? We cannot shoot down the satellites."

That is the state of play as of May 2026. A single company controls the most extensive communications network in history. Governments depend on it but cannot regulate it. International law does not account for it. And the person who decides who gets service and who does not answers to no regulatory authority, no international body, and no democratic process. He answers to the market, to his investors, and to himself.

The question that remains open is whether this is a temporary imbalance—a regulatory gap that will eventually close as law catches up to technology—or whether we have entered a new era in which critical infrastructure is, by design, beyond the reach of national sovereignty. The answer will determine not just who gets internet access, but who holds power in the twenty-first century. And right now, we do not know.