A new ‘Star Wars’ in the offing?

The Digital Alarmist

Of the numerous international treaties currently in place, the one that will prove to be most significant in the years to come is the Outer Space Treaty (OST) whose signatories include the US, Russia, and China. The OST, which forms the basis for international space law, expressly prohibits the placement of nuclear weapons or weapons of mass destruction in space or establishing military bases on celestial bodies. It does not, however, prohibit the exploitation of these very same celestial objects for commercial purposes such as setting up space colonies or mining them for minerals. There is a distinct possibility that an internet linking the terrestrial with the extra-terrestrial will be set up, one without any rules or regulations, just as on earth.

You must have a great sense of humour if you think that the recently announced maiden flight of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin or Elon Musk’s SpaceX ventures are motivated by scientific curiosity. They are much like Vasco da Gama or Christopher Columbus in the 15th and 16th centuries sailing off into the wild blue yonder in search of adventure or riches.

The ongoing war between Google and Facebook for control of the digital advertising space on earth or the Amazon/Walmart tussle for control of the e-commerce space will soon be extended to outer space as well. That these companies would make outer space their home offices and use cryptocurrencies for all transactions is not beyond the realm of possibility. The current interpretation of Facebook’s Multiverse should go well beyond the real, the augmented and the virtual worlds.

In its current form, the internet is an unregulated international service that runs on top of telecommunications systems, free of direct interference by geo-political entities. There is no international treaty on the internet as one would expect, simply because private corporations which currently manage the net do not like to be regulated by any government, though their publicly stated position is that such regulations would lead to loss of freedom of expression and possible censorship by autocratic countries. Curiously enough, these very same companies practice censorship to varying degrees and, at the same time, do rely on their governments to ensure their communications infrastructures and assets (mostly your data) are always protected. The companies want to have it both ways, it seems.

One person’s unfettered freedom of expression is someone else’s loss of economic and commercial interests, and vice versa. Since personhood has long been bestowed on corporations, corporates are presumed to have inalienable rights, rights enforceable both within and across territorial borders by the imperial might of the nation-states where these corporations reside. The passage of the US Space Act in 2015, which confers upon US citizens legal rights to own resources in outer space, coupled with the creation of the US Space Command in 2019 are harbingers of where we are headed in the near future.

In a recent address, India’s Chief of Defence Staff, Gen Bipin Rawat, in bemoaning the new security threats posed by cyber warfare, social media manipulation and the militarisation of space, ignored the much larger issue of the possible rampant commercialisation of outer space, a feat that can only be achieved by a handful of companies located in a handful of nations with significant space programmes.

There is no restriction of access to the oceans and seas beyond the 12-mile limit of coastal zones, as stipulated by the UN Convention on the Law of the Seas, which went into effect in 1994. (Incidentally, the US has not ratified it). However, there is no such equivalent for outer space, even though the US Space Command has arbitrarily chosen 100 miles of extra-terrestrial space to be under its purview. Communication satellites are typically positioned about 23,000 miles from earth to be considered stationary. A stationary satellite is an artificial construct, as artificial as the islands created in the oceans by countries such as China and using the 12-mile coastal zone rule to control navigation and limit maritime activities by other countries.

Just imagine what would happen if a satellite’s owner were to treat the space enclosed by a sphere of radius 100 miles centered around the satellite to be their sovereign territory. And Amazon recently announced plans to place nearly 3,000 satellites in orbit to bring the internet to even the most remote locations on earth.

Now that the Iraq and Afghan wars are over, Star Wars is about to begin. You can watch it on the internet. Live.

(Roger Marshalla is a computer scientist, a newly minted Luddite and a cynic)