[someperson]

Amazon's obligation to "launch at least half of the total by 2026 to retain the operating license the FCC has granted the company" is designed to stop squatting on the license without delivering service, and it's with the US government NOT the International Telecommunication Union.

If Amazon has shown at least some launches done in good faith, expect the FCC to be VERY lenient if Amazon don't meet their goal of launching 1618 out of 3236 satellites.

Though if in the year 2026 Amazon has missed their target by a significant amount, expect SpaceX to sue to try to get the spectrum partially re-allocated so they can leverage it for their (likely already fully operational) Starlink service.

[zie]

I agree with what you say here. If they are pretty close, I don't think anyone will care much, though perhaps a lawsuit or two by competitors to give their lawyers something to do wouldn't be unfounded :)

But if they are way off, if they only launch 120 sats, instead of the 1,618 they need to launch, I expect even the FCC would rake them over the coals some. If SpaceX is the only provider that met their timeline with the FCC(which seems more and more likely as time goes by that they will be the only one), they will still probably be lenient, but I imagine they will get a stern talking to, about hurrying up!

[dragonwriter]

> If Amazon has shown at least some launches done in good faith, expect the FCC to be VERY lenient if Amazon don't meet their goal of launching 1618 out of 3236 satellites.

That...depends. The FCC has been rather politicized recently, and shifts approximately with US Presidential Administrations; if when the time came the Administration was as anti-Bezos as the current one, I wouldn't be surprised to see it hold Amazon to the letter of the terms whether or not the intent of the rules was different and usual practice involved fairly easy modification as long as good-faith effort was shown.