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Il Foglio kindly warns Musk: be careful that Meloni didn’t notice a regulatory flaw against Starlink…

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Il Foglio kindly warns Musk: be careful that Meloni didn't notice a regulatory flaw against Starlink...

Green light for "anti-pezzotto" amendments in the Omnibus decree: prison for Internet service providers (such as Starlink, Elon Musk's SpaceX division, Il Foglio notes…)

According to Il Foglio, it is the Meloni government itself that is hindering the potential business of the American entrepreneur Elon Musk in Italy.

After Giorgia Meloni's award ceremony on September 23rd at the Atlantic Council at the hands of the founder and CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, media attention is now focused on business: there are possible economic deals that Musk and the Meloni government can implement in our village?

“The Prime Minister is certainly trying to do something very important: attract investments. Investments that arrive in many European countries, however, very often do not reach Italy due to problems that we all know a little about" , noted last September 27th Andrea Stroppa – SpaceX advisor in Italy, who is helping to weave relations between SpaceX and the Italian executive – on the Rai Radio 1 program Zapping hosted by Giancarlo Loquenzi.

One of these is the regulatory and bureaucratic burden. Like the latest new crackdown against piracy of TV content, included in the Omnibus decree, which provides for fines and prison for those who do not report illegal access to pay channels. The measures also include the involvement of large research platforms and internet services (such as Starlink by SpaceX), noted today the director of Il Foglio Claudio Cerasa.

All the details on the paradox highlighted today by the editor of Il Foglio between the economic ambitions of Prime Minister Meloni and the political trajectory undertaken by her own government.

THE APPROVED AMENDMENT TO THE OMNIBUS DECREE

The Senate gives the green light to the O mnibus decree : among the measures approved in the first reading there is also a new crackdown on piracy in football TV. Yesterday the Budget and Finance commissions meeting in the Senate approved two "anti-pezzotto" amendments signed by Fratelli d'Italia and Forza Italia. Among these, the most controversial provides for "network access service providers" to be jailed for up to one year in the event of "failure to report" pirated broadcasts which concern, above all, football matches via apps and sites.

IMPRISONMENT OF UP TO ONE YEAR IS EXPECTED

Specifically, amendment 6.0.36 acts on the anti-piracy law: "Network access service providers, search engine managers and information society service providers, including VPN providers and intermediaries (virtual private network) or in any case of technical solutions that hinder the identification of the IP address of origin, the operators of content delivery networks, the providers of internet security services and distributed DNS, which place themselves among the visitors of a site , and hosting providers who act as reverse proxy servers for websites, when they become aware that criminal conduct pursuant to this law is in progress or has been committed or attempted" must "immediately report" to the authorities "such circumstances, providing all available information” and notify “one contact one point of contact” to communicate directly. And in the case of "failure to report" and "communication" by service providers, the punishment is "with imprisonment of up to one year".

WHAT CLAUDIO CERASA IS WRITING TODAY

“There is more to that decree” explains Foglio director Claudio Ceresa today: “The companies subject to this obligation, as is easy to understand, are almost all those involved in the so-called Internet value chain: the telcos ( that sell access subscriptions to the end customer), search engines (Google, Edge and others), VPN providers (which for 30 euros per year mask the country of access), the large platforms that sell cloud services (and also the so-called content delivery networks)”.

STARLINK AMONG INTERNET SERVICE PROVIDERS (THEREFORE WITHIN THE SCOPE OF APPLICATION OF THE REGULATION)

But what does all this have to do with Elon Musk? Quite a lot, according to the director of Il Foglio since among the internet service providers included in the scope of the legislation in question there is also Starlink, the constellation of satellites of the aerospace company SpaceX designed to provide broadband internet services throughout the world, particularly in rural areas and poorly served by other networks.

SpaceX's Starlink owns about 60% of the approximately 7,500 satellites orbiting Earth and is a dominant player in the satellite internet industry. To date, SpaceX has launched over 6,000 satellites and continues to expand the constellation. According to data released by AgCom at the end of last year, around 30 thousand satellite connections were activated in Italy, most of which were Starlink.

A few months ago the company launched a new economical Starlink subscription in Italy, at the price of 29 euros per month, which is added to the standard one of 40 euros per month. A move to win over more users… and more. The agreement between Telespazio SpaceX to integrate the Starlink satellite Internet satellites into the offer of the space joint venture between Leonardo and Thales dates back to last July .

Precisely for the agreement between SpaceX and Telespazio, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni immediately received applause, a signal that the government would welcome other of these agreements with Musk's company.

WHAT STARLINK COULD DO IN ITALY

And the company's advisor Andrea Stroppa intervened on SpaceX's possible deals in Italy.

“The space theme has two strands: one is the actual aerospace one, Italy has an important supply chain of companies that produce components, they are medium-small companies. These companies need to grow and to do so they need an ecosystem. SpaceX is the company that brings 90% of what is transported into orbit: there are already Italian companies that collaborate with SpaceX, there should be a greater collaboration, which becomes a system", explained Stroppa to Zapping's microphones.

“Then there is the Internet issue: Italy is a very difficult country to connect due to the morphology of its territory. The proposal that emerged with Starlink: since the service already has an infrastructure, there is no need to puncture the road (which is somewhat of the problem of bringing fiber to Italy), connectivity is already available throughout the national territory and covers it at any point. So there is a great saving on what should be the investment in the infrastructure: let's pool the resources and offer the Internet to the lower classes at a very accessible cost" highlighted Elon Musk's Italian advisor on Radio Rai 1.

THE WARNING FOR MUSK FROM THE EDITOR OF THE FOGLIO

Yet it is precisely government policy that hinders these possibilities.

“You may have understood where the drama is” Cerasa insists from the columns of his newspaper: “if a magistrate from a small prosecutor's office decides to want to find a way to get noticed he could accuse one of these subjects of not having made the report. And in a country where we have specialized in having the burden of proof reversed, that is, where those who are accused of something must demonstrate that they did not know what was happening, it doesn't take much to imagine how nothing is enough to summon in a power of attorney an Elon Musk or whoever for him to explain his omitted vigilance. Meloni returned from the United States promising to do everything to invite entrepreneurs to invest in Italy."

“It cannot be said that it started off on the right foot” therefore comments the director of the Foglio, concluding with a pinch of sarcasm “Unless we want to demonstrate that creating the conditions to multiply the powers of the prosecutor's offices is a way to stimulate entrepreneurs to bet on our country."

WHAT ANDREA STROPPA THINKS

On the other hand, "Musk's ambassador to Italy" Andrea Stroppa had repeatedly attacked some trends in Italian politics from his X profile.

“Uninterrupted high-speed communication in space and on earth. This technology is called Starlink. Politics can decide to connect Italians tomorrow. Or some politician may decide to continue inflating the portfolios of some companies,” he recently wrote in a post on X Stroppa.

The latest blow, again entrusted to the X platform, dates back to a few days ago: “Starlink arrives in Burundi, Zimbabwe creating thousands of jobs. Vietnam takes home a 1.5 billion investment. Here politicians compete to see who insults entrepreneurs the most… who cares about the people anyway. They guaranteed their salary."

This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/spazio-e-difesa/il-foglio-avverte-amabilmente-musk-occhio-che-meloni-non-si-e-accorta-di-una-magagna-normativa-contro-starlink/ on Tue, 01 Oct 2024 12:57:04 +0000.