It all depends on where the downlinks are. I would expect the US government will require all US customer traffic to be handed off to the public Internet in the

It all depends on where the downlinks are. I would expect the US government will require all US customer traffic to be handed off to the public Internet in the USA. Then it's subject to standard legal intercept. There was an equivalent project (satellite internet) in New Zealand which was killed off because the government required that the downlink happened in NZ for legal intercept (and censorship) reasons. The costs only worked if the downlink happened in Australia (the project could share costs with Australian telcos) The downlink for NZ customers _had_ to happen in NZ, having it hit Australia and be routed back to NZ wasn't enough.