The upside of Starlink is it’s not easily blockable by a terrestrial nation state; the downside of Starlink is it’s easily blockable by a single fickle trillionaire. That first problem’s been a bear to work around for the entire Internet era, that second one’s gonna be the challenge going forward.

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fedpost 3 hours ago | parent [-]

We should just nationalize SpaceX at this point.

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saturn8601 an hour ago | parent [-]

People keep saying this, how do you guarantee that Starlink doesn't turn to crap after it is nationalized? No one who calls for nationalization ever has an answer to this.

Frankly, there is the argument that all of this tech and optimization was there for others to develop but no one cared that much and its only now after you and others realize how good it is that you want to just go in and take it "because its so vital to national security".

Furthermore why can't someone just copy them? Drop a ton of money on poaching their engineers and just copy whatever the government needs?

Clearly leadership at SpaceX including Musk are a driving force behind this being so good...just look at the trash all the other companies are peddling. The magic might just go away if its nationalized and if it does then you probably can't just go "oh sorry bro heres your company back pls give us more magic".

	▲	panick21_ an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> how do you guarantee that Starlink doesn't turn to crap after it is nationalized How do you guarantee that Starlink doesn't turn to crap if you don't nationalize it? Its a silly question. Governments have successfully operated various telecommunication systems for a long time. Lots of modern telecommunications and sat tech comes out of the government. But this will depend on each countries experience. I think one can make a solid argument that the denationalization of telco systems in the 90s was a mistake. Same goes for the breakup of AT&T. The better option would have been to just nationalize the baby bells. And make AT&T focus on long distance competition and the technology. Maybe also nationalize Bell Labs and keep it operating financed from a the income of the Baby Bells. Because what actually happened is that these Baby Bells simply got massive monopolies, made gigantic profits and were then able to do lots of other infrastructure plays and then mostly glob back together. > take it "because its so vital to national security". I think for that you don't need to take it. If you take (forced sale) it, it would be because you want to provide universal access subsidized without lining Musk pockets even more. But you would need a real long term vision for this to be worth it. > Furthermore why can't someone just copy them? Drop a ton of money on poaching their engineers and just copy whatever the government needs? Because the system is already built and working, why spend the capital on building the same thing again. For me some kind of open access law would make more then nationalization. But the suggestion to nationalize isn't crazy.