The FCC’s high-profile bet on Elon Musk

Not everyone is thrilled with Starlink or SpaceX. Some reviews complain that the service is unreliable and can be slow. Astronomers are concerned that the thousands of satellites that Starlink and similar services plan to deploy will obscure their vision of the sky; others worry that the satellites will add to space that is already too crowded, and increase the risk of collisions. Rivals have accused SpaceX of overpromising Starlink’s capabilities to get nearly $1 billion in government subsidies from the Federal Communications Commission, money that was part of a program that has also been controversial. SpaceX was of the biggest beneficiaries of the FCC’s recent $9.4 billion Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) auction, winning nearly $900 million to provide low latency internet service with “above baseline” speed (defined as 100 Mbps download and 20 upload) to roughly 640,000 locations across 35 states. “[Former FCC Chairman Ajit] Pai decided to go all-in on this,” said Harold Feld, senior vice president at the open internet advocacy group Public Knowledge. “When you don’t want to actually do anything in terms of regulating the existing incumbents, you bet on new technologies.”

There are also concerns that areas awarded to SpaceX now won’t get any investment in terrestrial internet, since the subsidy those providers say they need to make such connections cost-efficient isn’t there. That’s fine if the location is so remote that no terrestrial internet company was ever going to spend the money to connect it anyway. It might not be so fine if it means your home is now relying on Starlink to emerge from beta mode, work correctly, and be affordable, when a subsidy to a terrestrial provider would have gotten you connected much sooner.