Because this is so useful to several industries, governments absolutely cannot let Elon maintain a monopoly on what may become fundamental infrastructure. We've already seen what happened in Ukraine.

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ethagknight 2 hours ago | parent [-]

He has created something that didn't exist a few years ago, and now governments "absolutely cannot let Elon maintain a monopoly" are you saying they need to subsidize competitors or they need to ban Starlink or they need to nationalize Starlink?

Those are the three options for your mandate.

the non-government intervention option is just for Starlink to prove the market, and others can move in. SpaceX is willing to sell them the ride for a decent price, in relative terms.

	▲	panick21_ an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Honestly its an interesting question. Fundamentally, I am in the Camp that I fucking hate Musk, I didn't use to. But its undeniable, how influential he is in SpaceX and Starlink in particular. I remember all the podcasts and haters shitting on him in, I think 2016, when the complete Starlink leadship was fired. We don't know all the details, but it's said that they wanted to do a whole other round of test sats and so on. Musk wanted to push harder on go live sooner. That' seems to have turned out quite well with no major issues in the first generation. So SpaceX and Musk most certainty deserve a big reward for that. I agree that just rushing into 'its monopoly we must destroy the monopoly' isn't the right approach. > Those are the three options for your mandate. Those are not actually the only 3 only options. That's an incredibly narrow minded approach. I have some idea but I'm sure there are more. For example, what often works with infrastructure like this is open access rights. What if we can decouple the ground and sats infrastructure. Allow anybody to build terminals for it. And then potentially eventually even have terminals that can use multiple such systems. I'm not an expert on these systems and how exactly they connect but long term I assume this would be possible. Because that's exactly what "GPS" does today, it connects to like 6 different systems. You could pay SpaceX a one-time fee for that. Or a license per terminal. Or you could start to establish some standard for laser connectivity in space that eventually everybody can connect to a waste laser data network in space. You can also make other rules. Like net neutrality, SpaceX isn't allowed to block certain things or do certain things. Government could also chance its mentality to spectrum and maybe the buy to own spectrum model isn't fantastic. That said, nationalization is on the table as well. One can make the argument that having multiple such system isn't really worth it. Having one and then giving it out in a different way isn't crazy. SpaceX could still be a transport provider. Also less controversially, I think the 'monopoly' thing is way worse when it comes to the Ukraine. That is a situation where the government should be clear about how to handle it. We can't have Musk doing his own foreign policy.