Christopher Ali, the Pioneers Chair in Telecommunications at Penn State University, recently called for consideration of rate regulation for broadband providers. His main argument is that some households still have difficulty paying their Internet bill. That may be true for some in the short term. However, the best way to ensure lower prices and greater innovation for most consumers over the long term remains continued promotion of increased competition with market-determined prices. There is considerable evidence showing a steady pattern of increasingly faster speeds and lower prices per megabyte per second over the last few years. In other words, on average, consumers are paying less for more broadband capacity. Rate regulation almost certainly would reverse this.

SpaceX’s Starship rocket thundered into the sky over South Texas on September 28. It was the 14th test flight of the world’s most powerful launch vehicle. This time, however, the rocket’s massive upper stage squeezed out some extra oomph from its Raptor engines and accelerated to orbital velocity. On all of Starship’s previous flights, SpaceX intentionally dialed back the full capability of the rocket to fly a suborbital trajectory, slow enough for Earth’s gravity to pull the vehicle back into the atmosphere before it could complete a full lap around the planet. After several successful suborbital flights in a row, SpaceX officials decided this launch should go all the way to low-Earth orbit. And it did. What’s more, SpaceX packed 26 of the company’s newest generation of Starlink broadband satellites into the rocket’s cargo bay. One by one, the flat-packed satellites—too large to fit inside SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket—were released from Starship’s payload deployer using a system of pulleys and cables to eject the satellites overboard like a Pez dispenser spits out candy.