[lefstathiou]

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.

[sitkack]

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?

[lefstathiou]

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.