this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2026
951 points (99.3% liked)
Technology
89443 readers
4440 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
One could argue that low earth orbit is a natural monopoly like water pipes, electricity poles or railroads, and should be owned by governments, that could rent bandwidth to companies.
There are a few problems with that, would it be owned by the UN with US, Russian, British, French and Chinese veto powers over its use? Would it just be one country, and then the US would be able to help let's say Russia by turning down physical speed limits of internet connections for drones cutting out musk from the equation? Would it be based on whose airspace they are in at the time to rent out the data as required, thus stopping Ukraine from doing deep strikes into Russia? Also and most importantly figuring this out would be hard work and politicians are historically lazy on things that don't affect them personally and why would they fight Elon musk to nationalize SpaceX or the satellites they own for Starlink when they can just sit back and be bribed much more easily?
They could build international hubs that any nation can add to and share the space. They built the ISS and ran it for long enough its technically possible. Not that I think the leaders of this world are capable of being long sighted on anything right now
The only international organization the could manage something like that that would have a possibility of keeping a free and open internet would be something like the UN for world wide usage where a sub organization, with open books would need to be audited by anyone, see my other response in this comment chain for more details.