| > It's like we learned nothing from the wholesale give away of our airways to corporate interests. What giveaway? EM spectrum is already owned by the public. But it's scarce, so it's tightly regulated, and bands are licensed. This already gives the public the ultimate control over Starlink: governments can, at any time, take away Starlink's ability to operate over their territory. > Compare this opportunity to the magnitude of life changing innovations the GPS public good brought us. GPS satellites are a public good. Civilian-use GPS receivers are private products. And sure, one day maybe it'll make sense for there to be government-operated Internet satellites. But before that happens, it'll first make sense to have the government be the ISP and the cellular telephony provider. If you're worried about private control over the Internet, you're barking at the wrong ISO/OSI layer. The Internet is already a quasi-public-good due to the intersection of laws and Internet's distributed nature. The forces that want to control it are companies like Google and Facebook, that try to make Internet less distributed where it matters. Not Starlink. > We've given away space. It's funny to say that when talking about a product whose primary reason for being is to open up space for everyone. It's like everyone forgot that Starlink exists to fund Starship R&D. It's literally trying to give us space, so that we truly have it for the first time ever. |
My general point is that the USA needs a free public Internet.
Our politicians have no vision for the future of America. They should have done this. If they want to put up cell towers every where I'm OK with that too.
The world is leaving us in the dust.