I'm not exactly upset, but I have a somewhat uneasy feeling about how a foreign private company can seemingly walk all over national and international law like that and get away with it. (SpaceX isn't exactly an NGO or hacker/ham collective.)
Sure, it currently seems to lead to good outcomes in my eyes (democracy and access to information > most alternatives), but what if it one day does not? Trust in laws and international agreements is, like all trust, gained in drops and lost in buckets.
The company is not "walking all over national and international laws", the citizens are. The company is simply not enforcing those laws as strictly as it could.
In practice, laws are only as effective as a government's willingness to use its monopoly on violence to enforce them.
The international treaties state that SpaceX, the company not the users, shall not broadcast into countries without permission. When SpaceX, the company not the users, does that they are trampling all over the law.
yeah, it's like exporting guns from US knowing it's going to locally-illegal hands. Maybe not as bad as guns, more like alcohol to a highly religious country, but still. The destination countries kind of has full rights to prosecute personnel involved, should they ever fly there.
They don't care because their employees are never going to fly to those [whatever series of expletives] countries, and that's not um ... not nice.
If you only read or listen to one of them, go for Harp's book, it's more like a thriller and less of an academic treatise, and quite a bit more visceral in its delivery.
