ITWeb contributor Phillip de Wet.
What happens if the United Kingdom blocks X? Last week that was a silly question, on which bookmakers offered silly odds. On Monday, a member of Cabinet stood in the UK Parliament and vowed to – within days – activate legislation that would leave X and its users open to criminal prosecution.
And to say, explicitly, that the UK government could, and if necessary, would, “stop UK users accessing the site”.
So, by Tuesday there was another question very much on the minds of more than 100 000 people in the United Kingdom: if it is to be a war, will Elon Musk turn off their internet?
Because he could.
Starlink does not provide a geographic breakdown of users. However, Britain’s Ofcom (the same regulator that is investigating Grok for generating and X for hosting non-consensual intimate images and child abuse material) tells us that Starlink grew by more than a quarter in the UK during 2025, to more than 110 000 active connections.
Those connections are impressive, about 210 Mbit/s down and 20 Mbit/s up. Thousands of them are used in places where there is no prospect of ever getting any sort of line or fixed-wireless alternative.
In theory, almost all the wealthy and densely populated UK has at least some 2G or better. In real-world conditions, not so much, and certainly not to the extent that rural schools and agricultural businesses can run mission-critical systems.
Amazon Leo (previously Project Kuiper) is due in the UK in 2026. Again, theory is nice. Until Amazon’s satellite service shows itself to be equally real-world capable and affordable, Starlink is a lifeline service.
Musk holds the kill switch to that lifeline, and neither his investors nor his government will stop him from pressing it. He answers to neither boards nor regulators, and executives in his companies who challenge him are summarily defenestrated. He has increasingly proved keen to emulate or exceed the muscular, damn-the-consequences approach of Donald Trump at every turn.
Would you care to be on the user side of that equation?
Had South Africa’s policymakers and regulators been any good at their jobs, there would have been SA users in that exact position.
Maybe the risk would have been Trump and Musk making up and convincing each other that South Africa needed some punishment. Maybe the trigger would have been SA’s relationship with Iran, or a South African response to the latest outrageously illegal thing X did without remorse. Whatever it was, every Starlink user would have to fear being summarily disconnected by a capricious owner.
By rights, that should have been the case. Starlink should have been allowed into the South African market long ago. There is no other service like it. It is a genuine digital enabler of the likes we have not seen since cellphones first came around. SpaceX is a textbook example of the kind of company that, due to its corporate structure and operational realities, should be excluded from BEE equity requirements.
This wasn’t even a hard problem to solve; a little bit of political will and virtually no political capital would have done it.
Now, of course, the incompetence and inertia that kept Starlink out of SA seems like a godsend. In the UK, Starlink is a knife to the throat. In South Africa, it is yet another nice thing only the First World ever got to use before it stopped being relevant.
Better to struggle on with two tin cans and a bit of string for a while longer, until Amazon comes to the rescue.
Engineering exactly that, keeping the status quo is, of course, trivial. The South African government needs never say “no” to the potential users clamouring for Starlink. It need not risk yet another confrontation with the Trump administration. It can simply continue to fail to get the job done.
Except this time, it can do nothing strategically.
