India ready to greenlight Starlink – as long as it lets New Delhi censor, snoop

Officials demand device registration, location locking, logs of user activity

India’s telecom regulator has signaled it’s ready to let Starlink and other satellite-broadband providers operate – but only if they agree to strict conditions, including setting up “special monitoring zones” within 50km of land borders where law enforcement and security agencies are permitted to monitor users.

That’s just one of the requirements the nation's Department of Telecommunications revealed on Monday when it published [PDF] rules for what it calls Global Mobile Personal Communication by Satellite (GMPCS) operators – such as SpaceX’s Starlink, Amazon’s rival Project Kuiper, and similar operators.

The rules require all GMPCS terminals to be registered with the regulator before use, and for terminals acquired outside India to be geo-blocked so they can’t work until users register their devices with local authorities. The regulator also wants all terminals acquired for services in a single location to be locked if they move from the coordinates recorded during the registration process. Any unregistered terminal detected operating within Indian territory must be disconnected ASAP.

If Indian authorities decide a terminal is "identified as rogue for its malicious activities," the operator must immediately block it.

The rules also require GMPCS operators to intercept traffic – a requirement conventional telcos and ISPs also face under Indian law – and to record public and private IP addresses used during each session among other metadata.

And if a website is blocked in India, it also must be blocked by the satellite service.

In addition, the "special monitoring zones" must also cover India's Exclusive Economic Zone, stretching up to 200 nautical miles offshore.

All of the above is to be implemented at a control center on Indian soil.

These rules reflect a belief that separatist insurgents in some Indian states have used Starlink to evade surveillance. India also claims that Pakistan backs violent pro-independence groups in the disputed territory of Kashmir, and cuts off mobile internet services there for years on national security grounds.

In late April, gunmen murdered 25 tourists in Kashmir, an event India used as the rationale for airstrikes on Pakistan on Tuesday. Both nations possess nuclear weapons, so let’s hope this doesn’t escalate.

It's worth pointing out countries all over the world have similar legal requirements for telecommunications providers – namely monitoring and blocking content. Your humble vulture's home nation of Australia has such surveillance laws on the books, for example, requiring court authorization as necessary.

Elon’s free speech stance to be tested

When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the US in March, SpaceX boss Elon Musk reportedly lobbied him to allow Starlink into India. Starlink later announced relationships with India’s two biggest telcos, Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel, which plan to resell the service once it’s licensed.

But Starlink has yet to win a license to operate in India, although Indian media on Wednesday reported the satellite ISP has received a letter of intent that indicates a license will be issued.

If that happens, Elon Musk’s self-professed free speech views may be tested. He's railed against government censorship in the past, defying Australian government orders to remove violent content from X and later describing lawmakers as “fascists” for proposing laws that would require takedowns of deliberate misinformation.

Then again, Musk has been perfectly happy to threaten and sue advertisers who boycotted his social media platform, X, so perhaps his position on free speech is more expedient than principled. ®

Speaking of Elon...

• In trade talks, the US State Department pushed nations facing import tariffs in America to clear regulatory hurdles for the billionaire's Starlink operation, reports the Washington Post – owned by Jeff Bezos, founder and exec chairman of Amazon and its Starlink rival Kuiper.
• Also from the newspaper: The Trump-blessed Musk-run DOGE team hopes to create a centralized personal information database of millions of US residents.