One Company, Many Countries
A satellite network looks as if it belongs to no country. Its satellites go around the planet every 90 minutes and its dishes fit in a backpack. International radio law says otherwise. Under the ITU's Radio Regulations, a transmitting station needs a licence from the country it operates in, and every satellite system is filed in Geneva by a national government that answers for it. Resolution 22, adopted in 2019, covers dishes transmitting from a country that never authorized them: the filing government is expected to cooperate and stop them.
For the Starlink filings at issue in Iran's case, the ITU board treats Norway as that government. The United States has been copied since mid-2023. The company is in Texas. That gap, between who answers in Geneva and who can tell the company what to do, runs through every case below.
Six Cases
| Country | What the government wanted | What happened | Company's stake | Washington |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Uganda, Jan. 2026 | No unlicensed service before the Jan. 15 election | "Service restriction tool" switched on Jan. 1; "no active Starlink terminals" left, the company told the regulator. Licence signed in May. | Seeking a licence | No objection on record |
| Brazil, Sept. 2024 | Block X under a court order | Starlink first refused, then complied on Sept. 3 after its accounts were frozen. The regulator confirmed the block. | Large market, frozen accounts, ground stations | No objection on record |
| Israel (controlling Gaza's networks), Nov. 2023 | Approval over any Gaza service | Israel's communications minister said Starlink could operate in Gaza only with ministry approval; later service ran at a field hospital with Israeli and UAE support. | Musk visiting; Israeli market | Close ally |
| Myanmar, Oct. 2025 | Scam compounds cut off (U.S. concern) | SpaceX said it disabled "over 2,500 Starlink Kits" near suspected scam centers. | Reputational | Had raised the concern |
| South Africa, 2024–25 | No service without a licence | About 350 to 400 reseller-managed accounts switched off in February 2024; roaming limits announced that April; roaming accounts cut in June 2025. Slow and partial. | Negotiating licence terms | No objection on record |
| Iran, 2023–26 | Unauthorized dishes switched off | The ITU board has repeatedly found that the rules are on Iran's side, and has refused to suspend the system. A few dishes Iran reported by serial number were turned off. The rest stay on. | No market | Policy since 2022 to help Iranians get around state censorship |
Each row has its own sources at the bottom. The Uganda statement is the company's own letter, as quoted by Uganda's Daily Monitor; on Jan. 13 Uganda's regulator went on to suspend public internet nationwide, two days before the vote. Daily Monitor → The opposition leader Bobi Wine appealed to Musk by name: "Democracy dies in darkness." AllAfrica →
What Geneva Found
DOCUMENTED. The ITU's board took up Iran's complaint at its 92nd meeting in March 2023 and has kept it on the agenda through its 102nd. Its published record, meeting by meeting:
- Unauthorized transmissions are "in direct contravention of the provisions of RR Article 18" (94th–96th meetings).
- Restrictions in customer contracts "did not qualify as compliance" (97th).
- An operator able to geolocate its dishes "was required to disable terminals operating without authorization within a territory," remotely if need be (98th).
- Norway "was unwilling to enforce" the board's decisions; the board noted that Starlink had disabled "over 2 500 terminals operating illegally in a given area" elsewhere (100th).
- Norway's actions were "not compliant" with Resolutions 22 and 25 and Article 18. The United States argued the board was exceeding its mandate; the board disagreed (101st).
- The board "did not have the authority to suspend frequency assignments." Neither Norway nor the United States had replied to its latest requests (102nd).
Each finding is addressed to governments. None of them reaches the company, and the board has said it has no tool that does. ITU record →
REPORTED. On Oct. 4, Iran's foreign ministry summoned Norway's ambassador, Paul Bjørnstad, and handed him a formal protest over the terminals, according to the Tasnim agency as carried by Iran International and Rudaw. No Norwegian reply has been reported. In mid-2024, Space Intel Report reported, the FCC told the board that "for global constellations, it is neither required nor practicable to turn off satellite beams over a given geographic area," warning that it could cut service next door, and said SpaceX had switched off the few dishes whose serial numbers Iran supplied. Space Intel → The board's requests were about dishes, not beams, and the Myanmar and Uganda cases show the company can disable dishes in bulk when it chooses to.
Washington is not a bystander in Iran. In September 2022 the Treasury issued a general license widening the internet services Iranians may receive despite sanctions, and Musk said SpaceX was activating Starlink there. In February 2026 the Wall Street Journal reported, citing U.S. officials, that the State Department had bought nearly 7,000 terminals, mostly in January, and smuggled about 6,000 into Iran after the crackdown on protests. WSJ → One of the two governments Geneva keeps asking to turn the dishes off was, by the Journal's account, buying them and moving them in. Israel's former prime minister, Naftali Bennett, said in June 2026 that he had started a program to acquire tens of thousands of terminals and smuggle them into Iran, and that the current Israeli government stopped it.
Ukraine: Asking Instead of Licensing
Ukraine got what it asked for, and then, in October, lost something it had. On Feb. 2, 2026, Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov announced a whitelist: every Starlink terminal in Ukraine had to be registered, and unregistered ones would be cut off, to stop Russian drones using the network. SpaceX worked with Kyiv on it, and Musk wrote that the steps "to stop the unauthorized use of Starlink by Russia have worked." Kyiv Post → That fits the pattern: a large existing market, and Washington on Kyiv's side.
October was different. The speed cap on military links was not a host country's refusal but a service level on a system Ukraine does not run. Who ordered it is still disputed; that story is in The Speed Limit →. REPORTED. Today, Oct. 24, Ukraine's defense ministry said full Starshield access was back, with speeds "exceeding 400 km/h; the connection is stable," and Zelensky confirmed it, according to CNN. CNN and the Journal report that the president had called Musk and asked him to restore it. Trump would not say: "Whether I called or whether somebody else called, doesn't make any difference, I guess. The bottom line, he put it back." CNBC reports he said on Friday he had not spoken with Musk about it. Kyiv had no licence to withdraw here, only a request to make, and the outcome was settled between Washington and Texas.
What the Pattern Says
INFERENCE. Two questions sort all six cases, and both can be answered before the outcome. Does the company want something in that market? Is the government that can instruct it against the host? When the first answer is yes and the second is no, as in Uganda, Brazil, Israel and Ukraine in January, the host's wish was carried out, sometimes within days. When the answers run the other way, as in Iran, rulings, resolutions and an ambassador's summons have not moved it at scale. South Africa, with a licence on the table and terms in dispute, got slow and partial enforcement.
The best argument for the Iran outcome is a moral one. Iran's government imprisons people for owning a dish, and keeping them connected serves a free-information policy Washington has stated openly since 2022. The Old Goat finds that persuasive on its own terms. The trouble is that the same company, in January, emptied Uganda of active terminals at a government's request on the eve of an election that government then held under a full internet blackout. If free information were the rule, Uganda would have gone the other way. What the two cases share is not a principle but a position: where the company's business and Washington's policy pointed.
The Old Goat would drop this reading if a counterexample turned up: a government with the company's business interest and Washington's backing that was still refused, or one with neither that still got its way. Other things that would weaken it include a change at the 2027 radio conference that lets a country force an unwilling operator off its territory, or records showing Norway did order the company to act in Iran and was ignored.
Related: Musk's role in government contracting is tracked on the Orbit tab →.