This is good news for the USA, but it's GREAT news for countries where the government regularly cuts off and controls the Internet for political purposes. If receivers can be as small as a personal laptop, expect a thriving black market in them in places like Iran and Egypt.
Such receivers can also act as backhaul for mesh networks, providing access to un-censored information in times of turmoil and peace alike.
EDIT:
Data customers would pay for access on an individual basis. Helicopter-parent countries might cry foul, but what leverage do they have? It's not like they were going to launch things with SpaceX and they can threaten to stop.
I think they need licenses to use the radio spectrum. I believe Iridium set up a system in China so that all calls are routed through Chinese systems, so there is some historical precedent. The government of China also has anti-satellite weapons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_mi... .
OTOH one country enabling communication infrastructure to another country's citizens without approval of their government would be rightly considered as violation of national sovereignty and could presumably be seen as an act of war.
But its the citizen of the country who initiated the communication, and the act of providing a service cannot be made as an excuse for war. At best, the citizen get prosecuted for illegal communication.
> Data customers would pay for access on an individual basis.
At a subscriber level, monthly billing to 'SpaceX Broadband, Redmond' might be cause for inquisitive State Police to visit.
At a state level, the legality of jamming / interfering with satellites over national territory has never been definitively established. So SpaceX might find it easier to just turn-off over hostile nations than have them upset the network.
The buying, selling and using of satellite internet equipment will be outlawed in countries that don't allow free access to the internet (unless of course the internet satellite company signs agreements to impose the blocking of choice of the regime in question).
SpaceX might be safe from the Turkish, Chinese or Egyptian governments, but the users won't be.
But what incentive would satellite communication providers have to agree? Wouldn't it be better to facilitate a black market by not putting any blocks?
Sometimes one government has more common ground with the government of another country than it has with its own citizens. A country that does not want its citizens to have SpaceX provided Internet could lobby the US government to require it to be blocked.
You can bet that the US government will want to exert control over it anyway to some degree so even if they are not always sympathetic to other governments requirements that lack of sympathy is a negotiating position not a matter of principle.
They can jam whatever frequency the networks operates on. Or embargo any receiver/tramistter that could be used to connect to the network. Yes, some people would be able to work around any attempt at blockage, but that wouldn't scale to providing non-technical people with cheap/unrestricted internet.
That's my point, if you have high gain in a particular direction, wouldn't interference coming from a different direction be mostly rejected? The point being, this could offer internet to people in repressed countries that can't practically be blocked or tampered with. If they coupled this with a free tier with low bandwidth it could be huge, assuming people could smuggle in the equipment to make it work.
Not an expert, but here is my take:
A phased array consists of many individual, non-directional antennas. The directionality comes by cleverly combining the signal of the antennas.
If there is a jamming signal, all antennas would receive it. In theory, it would then cancel out when the signals are combined. The question is now: Before the signal is combined, is there any element which can be saturated by the large jamming signal? If so, you can jam.
The phased array direction is tune-able, so I assume the combination is done in the digital domain. That means ADC in between, which can be saturated. So my guess is: yes.
If you couldn't jam the receiver, could you jam the satellite itself while it is over your territory? Direct enough signals at the satellite from your country that it can't respond to actual users? Sort of a DDoS attack?
I'd say it's more of problematic than great news for places with state controlled study. But it has potential.
Where it's Great news is places which already can use only satellite internet, but have very poor experience. Rural Australia for example. Having low local (or even global) latency would be amazing.
I'm pretty sure NSA will want a backdoor in the system. If it can do what they say it can do, they are basically the new pipes of the Internet. It's too good for NSA and our current US govt to leave untouched.
For plaintext communication, you should already assume someone's either listening, or will get recorded traffic in the future. Why do you think a specific backdoor in satellite traffic would change anything? The bandwidth there would also have physical constraints, more than a magic box at Telco, making full slurping harder.
It's not going to be better than GPS/GLONAS. If there is a specific location component in the ground stations, it will be known pretty soon. Otherwise, the location will be very weather dependent.
If you have a phone with you, you're likely providing a better location to Google/Apple right now.
Such receivers can also act as backhaul for mesh networks, providing access to un-censored information in times of turmoil and peace alike.