What Iran’s Internet Shutdown Reveals About Starlink

We are increasingly witnessing governments shutting down the internet around the world as methods of control and repression. When this occurs, governments are not acting outside the bounds of the system; they are pulling on levers that already exist and are built into law, licensing, and spectrum management.

Governments don’t simply employ these levers hastily in moments of crisis; these are standing authorities embedded in how digital infrastructure is governed and deployed. This reality has created space for technosolutionist responses, such as Elon Musk’s Starlink, to step in and market themselves as fixes. The logic is deceptively simple: If governments can shut down terrestrial networks, then connectivity must be rerouted. This is why satellite internet, in particular low-earth-orbit (LEO) systems, was framed as an alternative that was censorship-resistant, borderless, and immune to state power. The 2026 internet shutdown in Iran exposes the limits of this framing and reveals that satellite internet is not immune to disruption and that it is embedded in the same systems of sovereignty and control.

Why Starlink could not avoid state enforcement in Iran

Across Iran, amid a deepening economic crisis, surging inflation, a collapsing currency, and widespread anger and frustration over the rising cost of living, mass protests erupted at the end of December 2025. This in turn led to nationwide demonstrations demanding political change and an end to entrenched authoritarian rule. By early January, a brutal crackdown was inflicted, as the Iranian regime sought to control access to the internet, suppress dissent, and regain control through lethal force and mass arrests.

At the heart of the incident was a familiar playbook, seen in previous nationwide internet shutdowns in 2019 and 2022: the Iranian regime leveraging and asserting control over digital infrastructure, during moments of perceived heightened vulnerability. However, in this particular case, the Iranian regime adapted and evolved its approach to counteract the introduction and use of Starlink satellite internet services. This move was not an aberration, but an escalation within a familiar strategy.

At the legal level, national security justified the complete shutdown of the internet to sever communications. At the network level, the state exercised its control over domestic gateways, shutting down mobile data and fixed broadband nationwide while maintaining limited access to the state-controlled national intranet. At the satellite level, currently available evidence suggests that Iranian authorities employed spectrum enforcement measures, including interference with GPS signals (spoofing) with about 30-80% packet loss, radio-frequency jamming, seizures of satellite equipment, and cracking down on possession and use of satellite terminals in the country, punishable by up to 10 years imprisonment.

Seen together, the 2026 internet shutdown demonstrates that it was not a single technical measure employed by the Iranian regime but a coordinated, integrated strategy executed through the state’s control over infrastructure. Shutdowns are not failures of technology or governance; they are successful assertions of infrastructural power.

Starlink became one of the few remaining channels for information to flow out of Iran and played a critical role in enabling the documentation of human rights violations and the transmission of news during the shutdown. However, while satellite internet has been framed as an alternative during internet shutdowns, the events in Iran reveal a harder truth: that satellite internet operates within physical and technical constraints that states can exploit and abuse. Starlink terminals rely on GPS positioning and timing to maintain alignment with the satellites in orbit, in order to effectively manage uplink and downlink traffic. These signals are vulnerable to interference. In the case of Iran, GPS spoofing and radio-frequency jamming were deployed, gradually degrading the network. These same methods and tactics were employed by Russia in Ukraine in 2022. This was not a failure of Starlink’s engineering but a design trade-off; satellites must orbit low to achieve low latency and wide coverage, which makes them predictable and their signals more easily disrupted compared to geostationary systems.

The emergence of LEO-specific jammers across Iran and other repressive regimes reflects strategic investments and, combined with the criminalization of unauthorized terminals and door-to-door seizures. This shows that the technical vulnerability becomes a practical lever once states are willing to integrate it into a wider internet shutdown. This demonstrates that the capability gap often presumed to be technical is in fact political and perceptual: the satellites could have always been disabled under certain conditions, but the decision to do so depended entirely on the state’s will and strategic choices.

Starlink is not immune to internet shutdowns because it does not alter the structural mechanisms or incentives that drive shutdowns; instead, it merely shifts the burden of adaptation and risk onto users. In the process, making them beholden to unaccountable companies like Starlink. The resiliency of technical workarounds is shaped by the political and legal environment in which they operate. The Iran case demonstrates that satellite internet is another layer of infrastructure that will be absorbed into the same system of control, subject to interference, criminalization, and coercive enforcement. Resilience cannot be assumed to flow from technology alone; it is negotiated within, and constrained by, the broader context in which infrastructure is deployed.

Governance blind spots

Across other jurisdictions, laws consistently require authorization for spectrum use, prohibit unauthorized equipment, and allow penalties including fines, imprisonment, and seizure on those with active terminals. While Starlink terminals continue to be smuggled into the country, the Iranian regime officially treats Starlink and other unlicensed satellite systems as unauthorized use of its radio spectrum and criminalizes their possession and use; enforcement escalates during political unrest.

The shutdown in Iran exposed the structural limits of global governance. Spectrum management sits at the heart of this problem. Governments have sovereignty over radio spectrum, and the United Nations (UN) International Telecommunications Union’s (ITU) Radio Regulations are designed to facilitate coordination between governments and operators. They do not assess against the principles of proportionality, necessity, or harm, and nor do they provide effective remedies for those affected when spectrum enforcement is weaponised and abused, despite such measures being repeatedly condemned in UN Human Rights Council reports over the years. Therefore, actions such as blocking, jamming, or disabling satellite internet services can be framed as preventing harmful interference, rather than as deliberate political acts of censorship or repression.

The governance blind spot lies in the assumption that spectrum management is a neutral and solely technical domain. The governance model treats interference prevention, licensing, and enforcement as administrative functions insulated from political abuse. So when governments invoke these authorities, the system largely accepts their justifications at face value without considering the context. In the case of Iran, enforcement intensifies to prevent the outward flow of images and testimony, and coincides with arrests, surveillance, and violence on the ground. These are not neutral indicators of interference management; they are political acts embedded in infrastructure.

Within the ITU, there are no concrete mechanisms to distinguish between legitimate efforts to prevent harmful interference and deliberate attempts to silence dissent, suppress documentation of violence, violate human rights, or disrupt collective action. This is neither covert nor exceptional; it is sovereign authority exercised openly, in plain sight. For instance, Egypt’s 2020 case within the ITU revealed the use of mobile systems to detect, locate and disrupt unauthorized radio transmissions. While framed in technical and regulatory terms as spectrum enforcement, it raised concerns that such capabilities were used in practice to identify and suppress communications by activists and independent broadcasters operating outside state-controlled media systems.

Without meaningful safeguards, the legitimate exercise of spectrum enforcement can be abused, with deadly consequences. In a neutral narrative of ‘spectrum management’, such abuse falls comfortably within the rules, despite its effects being indistinguishable from censorship or repression. The abuse lies not in the existence of these mechanisms and tools themselves but in the deliberate use of lawful authority to silence dissent, restrict access to information, or conceal violence. What looks like a neutral technical process is, in fact, a lever of infrastructural power wielded against people.

The 2025 Myanmar case in the ITU makes the stakes even more concrete, showing that satellite operators such as SpaceX can act decisively. In this particular case, Starlink voluntarily disabled more than 2,500 active terminals without any request from the Myanmar government and without any location data being provided. This reveals that the technical ability to disable LEO satellite internet service exists, and the choice not to exercise it in certain contexts reflects companies’ political, commercial and geopolitical priorities. In the Iranian context, this underscores that access to satellite internet during shutdowns depends not only on state countermeasures but also on the governance choices and regulatory engagement of private operators, with significant implications for freedom of expression and access to information.

As a result, technical compliance is routinely conflated with legitimacy, despite the fact that adherence to regulatory standards does not guarantee alignment with international human rights law and norms. The result is a system in which governments can obscure coercive and repressive acts such as internet shutdowns or equipment seizures as neutral regulatory measures and spectrum enforcement, shrouded in the language of technical necessity. Meanwhile, private operators can claim neutrality while exercising substantial discretionary power over people’s access to the internet. What this shows us is that the system is not malfunctioning; it is doing exactly what it was designed to do: prioritizing sovereignty over accountability.

Infrastructure is not neutral

Internet shutdowns are not technical failures, but rather deliberate political acts enabled through infrastructure. The Iranian case explicitly demonstrates that digital infrastructure is not neutral. No technology can be a substitute for systemic legal and political protections. As long as the rules of the game stay the same, every new ‘workaround’ will become just another surface for power to grip.

Civil society and policymakers must therefore confront not only the existence of these tools, but the incentives, governance gaps, and geopolitical calculations that determine when, where, and against whom they are wielded.