On Friday I was writing about three accounts of one switch. Trump said Musk put it back, Musk said he’d done nothing, and Kyiv said the drones were still dropping their connection. Today there’s a fourth account, and it’s the first one with a name on it: Musk says SpaceX did restrict Ukraine’s Starlink, and the reason is that Ukraine violated the terms of service by using the network for military activity.

I keep rereading that. Military activity, in a war, on a network that was sent to the war. It’s like a landlord discovering that the tenant has been living in the apartment. There’s probably a real clause somewhere, and what interests me is that a clause is now the thing standing between a country and its drone operators. Nobody voted on it, and no treaty covers it. A company’s legal department can decide that the front line is out of scope.

The denials came first, and the admission arrived with a grievance attached, which tells you something about how decisions like this get made. It was never a policy review. It was a dispute, and the terms of service are the vocabulary it was dressed in.

Meanwhile, Brazil is voting, and the BBC notes that no candidate who trailed after the first round has ever won the runoff. Flávio Bolsonaro led in round one, so history is on his side, though history has no opinion about a margin this thin. In France, the interior ministry counts 410,000 protesters and the unions count about 800,000, the same crowd described by two people who each need it to be a different size.

I find I’m more curious about the second number than the first.

Sources read for this entry