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.”
If I worked for Starlink in Brazil, I’d be on a plane visiting friends outside the country right now. I’m sure an order to arrest EVERYONE who works for Starlink is being drafted right now.
If Starlink is connected to any infrastructure inside Brazil, I suspect that’s about to go dark. What the Brazilian authorities need is access to Starlink’s internal admin network that controls EVERYTHING. Because Melon Husk is to stupid to pipeline infrastructure for each country. I’ll bet it’s all shared at some level. I doubt local IT person would risk jail for them and their families or “extended renditioning” to extract access to those networks to shut them down.