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Comment by notJim | Hacker News Reader

What I find kind of frustrating about all of this is that it's really a lack of mandated and/or publicly-funded investment in infrastructure that even makes starlink appealing. When electricity came about, there was a massive project to electrify rural areas, so we didn't need to launch a constellation of satellites beaming microwave power to the whole planet. And now electricity is ubiquitous. There's no quibbling about whether a given area is profitable or not, because electricity is seen as a necessity for modern life. Internet should be seen the same way, and the necessary physical infrastructure should be built. The only reason it hasn't is that the telecom companies have bought out the government. So instead, we get these end-runs around the system that have massive externalities.

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I for one think the Supreme Court is the one who ruined everything. Verizon Inc v FCC (2002)[1] dismantled the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which had been working effectively to decouple physical infrastructure from internet service providing.

The Supreme Court sided with Verizon, who said basically "fiber is too expensive for us to be able to deploy, unless we get a monopoly over the infrastructure we build".

This has lead to enormous stagnation. DSL remained a competitive service, with a variety of competing entities, in the 90's & early aughts, because it still remained under the Telecommunications Act, of unbundled network elements, because of unbundled local loops. As soon as one company was allowed to own the infrastructure & every means to connect over it, the system of competition & innovation that had been working went away.

Now a days we have municipal service providers getting started. They too will exist in these same terms, as local infrastructure monopolies. They won't have a regulatory framework that systems like POTS / copper have, won't have any standards for cooperation / competition, since fiber as a whole has never been unbundled. Overall, I see this as a great potential weakness for municipal isps, and it's something I think the left & right might be interested in rectifying. It could be done municipality by municipality, with promises, but I for one think many people on many sides of the political spectrum have an interest in fixing this radical overreach & colossal corporate favoritism that was gifted by the Supreme Court.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verizon_Communications_Inc._v....

Starlink _is_ publicly funded infrastructure, to the tune of $885M of subsidies through federal aid for rural broadband. We have the technology to send the internet down from space, and arguably with a lower environmental impact than running fiber to the same places.

Building physical infrastructure isn't without environmental cost.

> The only reason it hasn't is that the telecom companies have bought out the government.

I don't think this is true really. There's been a really big shift in the last 50-ish years and at least in the US there seems to be a general consensus that projects of this nature are no longer the domain of the government.

I mean the telecom thing is a factor sure but I don't think you'd see that level of investment in infrastructure for anything else at this point either.

If we had had microwave power beaming satellites in the thirties, we might have used those instead of wiring up farms. In many developing countries, there still is no landline phone service because they just use mobile phones instead. I don't see what the problem is for some people that are in more remote locations to use satellite internet instead of wired, especially if, as in the case of Starlink, the performance is reasonably comparable.

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