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Comment by jongjong | Hacker News Reader

It's pretty obvious now that governments have been propping up the tech sector in many countries. It's a weird industry. Look at the biggest tech companies. They all start out with apparently legitimate products but slowly lose market share over decades, end up doing nothing and yet more profitable and more valuable than ever. Look at companies like Oracle, Microsoft, Palantir, SpaceX, Salesforce... Their main business is extracting money from the government.

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I think software, paradoxically, has deeper network and intertial effects than pretty much anything else we have invented so far. Compare the leverage it enables to the ecosystem lock in it forces.

With physical goods, it's not nearly that coupled.

>slowly lose market share over decades, end up doing nothing and yet more profitable and more valuable than ever

>SpaceX

SpaceX has been gaining market share, not losing, and its primary business is Starlink, of which most customers are consumers.

(there is also Starshield)

I was a bit hesitant to put SpaceX on the list as it has provided the government better value for money than NASA when launching rockets and the innovation is real. I also believe Elon is one of the better billionaires. His businesses haven't taken away opportunities from any small business. His chosen industries have irreducibly high capital requirements; small businesses cannot compete in those industries anyway and they are too risky.

My concern for SpaceX is more about post-IPO situation. Once new shareholders have their way, I don't see how it can avoid becoming corrupted. It looks like the perfect money pipe to obtain large amounts of money from the government.

Having used it, Starlink's entire business model seems to be rooted in handwavium. You'll almost never hit advertised speeds or latency, and there are regular outages where you get no service at all. The cost of the service fluctuates constantly if you don't get locked-in to a specific rate, too.

My impression is that Starlink is a hastily-launched DoD project. It's not a broadband replacement and scarcely an alternative to other satnet providers or LTE hotspots.

Most Satellite Internet users use Starlink.

Most Satellite data (including non internet data) is delivered over Starlink.

Most Satellite Internet revenue is from Starlink customers.

And I'm sure a certain Eastern European country wouldn't be asking to extend coverage to Russia if it was truly "scarcely an alternative"

The cost (actually price) you're complaining about is lower than than other satellite providers and significantly lower than what was available in 2019. Around the pricing of more expensive mobile internet data plans meant for hotspots (in the US)

I'm pretty sure no one paying residential pricing back was doing >1TB/month on SATCOM

The performance for most users is definitely above the 100/10 99ms advertised (per Ookla)

How long are these "regular outages"? Have you used the service in 2026?

All I'm gathering from this comment is that you aren't a customer. I used it from 2021 to early 2025; service got worse over-time as more subscribers were onboarded. If you lived in a higher or lower latitude like I did, you usually get 100ms+ of latency year-round, and all the way up until the end I was getting ~5% dropped packet attrition. The "Starlink is usable for gaming" line is a downright lie unless you're playing something turn-based like Chess.

I've used dialup, Hughesnet, WISPs and broadband, now - Starlink was the least-consistent performer by a wide margin. The one upside is the bandwidth figures, but when I wanted to use it for my seedbox Starlink sends me a meanly-written letter. The distinct feeling I got using Starlink was "huh, I must be subsidizing a dual-use system because this is not an acceptable baseline of service quality even by LTE standards."

100ms of latency to where?

These seem like congestion issues due to using a shared medium. It's not unusual for services like that to degrade especially between 5 and 10 pm

Where I use Starlink (and OneWeb) there's probably less than 50 users in my beam. And I get under 40ms to my POP consistently. When I started using it, it wasn't available in my country officially and my ping was over 150ms. I live around 4N

For your conspiracy theory, look up Surrey Space Technology. The idea of LEO satellite internet at SpaceX is older than Falcon 9.

As for seedbox matters, reread the letter you received. Starlink isn't monitoring your torrent use, the copyright owners are. Use a VPN. Lots of free/cheap ones out there.

I'm sorry your service is bad, but it's definitely not representative of Starlink service globally. The game I play is fine and it's definitely not chess. My mobile providers (yes I need two to make do; dual-sim FTW) DC me multiple times a day. Starlink doesn't. But I can't carry it everywhere.

I brought up several points you haven't refuted. The service is fine for most users and meets expectations today.

I started with dial-up, used Intelsat (you should really check the prices of other satellite providers, NBN satellite in Australia cost $8000 for 1TB in 2018) to sign up for this website and was using fixed wireless when I signed up with Starlink.

When's the last time you used Starlink?

It was rough when it first launched, but as of 2026 it's very fast and highly reliable, with shockingly low latency.

Microsoft's main business... is extracting money from the government.

Please, elaborate on where Microsoft is getting a hundred billion dollars plus per year from the government.

By an extreme margin Microsoft's main business is productivity software sold to businesses and consumers and has been for 40 years, along with Windows (the majority customers for which are businesses + consumers).

They don't produce anything that people like. Everyone using their products is forced to use it.

Their Office suite is foisted on governments. For example, several governments in the EU moved off of it starting a few years back... Many are still on it.

Oracle database is essentially never used outside of government nowadays. This has been the case for decades. Government is just locked into expensive contracts with them and they can charge whatever.

What's fascinating to me is just how many people in the American tech industry are in complete denial about the amount of government support their industry receives and by extension that they personally receive.

All too often someone who espouses libertarian or ultra free-market capitalist beliefs will smugly state that Silicon Valley is proof that America and free market ideals are better than another country such as say Norway, Finland, or Estonia.

I've never really had a good way to respond to that kind of belief in part because I'm not too well versed in the history of intelligence agencies funding American tech industries or the contemporary state of that relationship but also because it's so startlingly ubiquitous and adamant.

Does anyone else have any input on how it's best to address this misconception and worldview that people in SV have?

I literally Ctrl + F-ed 'capitalis' to find a comment that says the iPhone (the poster child of capitalism on the internet) too wasn't really a product of capitalism. Funny that this triggered a bunch of downvotes.

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