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by thecupisblue 2149 days ago
Quite wild, an American only agency/comission can say - "yeah, put 3,236 more sattelites in low-Earth orbit" and ruin the sky for the rest of the world. Do we not have an international body that would decide upon such rulings? With how fast this will escalate, we'll need to have one soon.
2 comments
lefstathiou 2149 days ago
I’m pretty sure we do. The issue will boil down to who should control (or be controlled) by it. I can imagine resistance from say NASA to have it’s policies determined by nations physically incapable of reaching space.

And the outcome of the debate will be a function of your values versus someone else’s, which could then spiral into whether or not one persons desire for a nice view of the night time sky is more important than someone else’s access to affordable high quality internet (which is increasingly being viewed as a “right” these days).

Who knows how this all plays out but my gut says that we are observing oligopolies in the making. The first 2-5 will get licenses and then no one else, ever again.

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sitkack 2149 days ago
If you go down the route of something being a right, but having oligopolies is _really_ bad, then it would seem that we should globalize space based internet. And why not? Civilization could transform in amazing ways if you can form a digital stream between any two locations on earth.

We already globalized highly accurate time and location, why not data streams?

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lefstathiou 2149 days ago
Location is dominated by the US via the GPS system which our government has unilateral control over (hence competing constellations).

Part of me also sees a potential National Security security angle to an oligopoly of US-based companies providing satellite internet everywhere. Countries are increasingly putting kill switches on their internet. In a period of conflict, where information flow is likely to be highly managed, its convenient to bypass all that infrastructure with satellite internet. I’m sure these satellites can pick and choose their frequency. No doubt we could point these things at North Korea.

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wcoenen 2149 days ago
> Do we not have an international body that would decide upon such rulings?

The International Telecommunications Union comes closest.

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