French court revokes Starlink's internet license
space.com
space.com
I struggle to see the monopolization concerns. Starlink will never be relevant for urban areas where most people live since the bandwidth provisioned is per area not per dwelling.
80% of the US population live in urban areas (just 2% of the land.) Even with infinite satellites eventually radio spectrum becomes the limiting factor. While you can have many low power cell stations in cities, satellites are far away and antennas not perfectly directional.
It's a long time since high school trig but with Starlink's narrow beam width of 1.3 degrees and satellites 550km up that's 12.5km diameter. So would be like everyone in SF sharing the bandwidth of a single cell tower.
The license which was awarded to spacex in February was for the use of specific radio bands which are regulated in France. The French regulator allowed SpaceX to use them arguing that these bands were large enough that they should be able to withstand multiple providers but without doing a formal study. The high court revoked it because by law the assessment was mandatory. The regulator is free to properly do it and allows spacex to operate again which is what’s going to happen.
France owns Ariane which is one of the only other commercial space launch platforms.
They can't really poke SpaceX directly since I don't imagine they have any substantial operations in France.
If anything, seems like France has a massive conflict of interest here to judge this.
France's central government budget is 410 billion € in 2020. In a "normal", non covid year, it has a ~70 billion € deficit. It has a similar deficit since a long time and things will probably worsen in next years, while revenues are declining since at least 10 years. Is bankruptcy something on the horizon?
France is not alone, Spain, Italy, Brazil, Belgium are in a similar situation.
France's price is perhaps too high but there are many rich people who could buy for example Belgium.
"You can't provide internet here."
"Yes I can... Look I'm doing it."
"Please stop."
"No"