Starlink operator SpaceX is fighting Virginia’s plan to deploy fiber Internet service to residents, claiming that federal grant money should be given to Starlink instead. SpaceX is already in line to win over $3 million in grant money in the state but is seeking $60 million.
Starlink is poised to benefit from the Trump administration rewriting rules for the $42 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) grant program. While the Biden administration decided that states should prioritize fiber in order to build more future-proof networks, the Trump administration ordered states to revise their plans with a “tech-neutral approach” and lower the average cost of serving each location.
“But I want a monopoly! I demand a monopoly! I’m not rich enough. I’m afraid I will run out of money and starve!” - The Goblin
It seems like the best solution would be to confiscate Starlink and nationalize it. Same with Space X. We paid for all of it, it should be ours. He can still work there, but he’ll collect a government salary, and expect to answer to a boss. Or get fired. Either way, I don’t care.
He can keep Tesla, that will be bankrupt in 2 years anyway.
It seems like the best solution would be to confiscate Starlink and nationalize it.
Not in the land of the Star-Spangled Banner, I’m afraid. That would be socialism. Orange Führer wouldn’t like that.
Looks like Elon Musk is getting way too powerful for his own good! He obviously hates competition! :-(
Well, thats fine. We should talk about where he is right now.
This company is acting like a spoiled brat of a child.
Didn’t work. They are laying fiber everywhere as we speak. So happy to kiss Comcast goodbye.
So happy for you! I’m still stuck with shady cable as they cancelled the 2024 rollout.
I swear Cable internet was propped up by hidden fees and promo pricing.
The way they are rolling through Central Virginia I’d say they will have most of VA done soon (relative to years). Even Bumpass has it now.
Comcast still offers fiber in some places, doesn’t mean Comcast will go away.
Comcast doesn’t necessarily have to go away as long as they don’t have a monopoly on the infrastructure used to deliver an essential utility to homes. But I’d have to agree it would be nice if they just went away too.
Does for me! They just ran FIOS and GloFiber through our yard last month.
Nice
Musk is a domestic terrorist.
Musk isn’t American; he’s an international terrorist
But he is, he has both US and Canadian citizenship in addition to S. African.
He cheated after coming here illegally. Then did a bunch of sex crimes and destroyed american jobs. No. Sorry but illegal immigrants to the torture prison.
I don’t make the rules; i just write fanfic about them being enforced evenly.
That doesn’t change the fact that he’s an American citizen. That’s what I was correcting.
Oh, so the government doesn’t kidnap or murder citizens now?
I’m not sure how that’s relevant. The OP claimed he wasn’t a citizen, I corrected that.
No, said it was foreign or internatuonal or something.
Which it is.
As an American, I do not claim him.
That’s fine, but he’s still a US citizen according to the law.
they hate you. always remember. they hate your entire existence. they’d literally crush you in a hydraulic press if they could. giving you pain is the only way they feel a semblance of happiness.
Look, yes, will we and they and literally all life end they aren’t stopped?
Sure, yes, obviously.
Can they be negotiated with persuaded medicated or coerced into rational sane self interest? Nope. Not one of them.
But if youre not willing to end all life for theit bullshit, to kill yourself in such a slow and spectacylar manner that no life escapes, you’re advocaging violence, you vig murdering dummy.
you almost had me there
I don’t think they hate us, it just that they love money more. They can, and do, inflict untold misery and suffering so long as there is money at the end of it.
no. there’s no end to the amount of disdain they have for you. they’d do it for free too; they just don’t have to.
People who disagree with you are people who never spent time with the ultra rich. I’ve had the pleasure to hang in those circles and it was absolutely eye opening the complete disdain that social class has toward the working class. It’s so fucking crazy that one has to see it for themselves to truly appreciate the hate they have for everyone not in their economic circles.
Preach on brother, but I also understand why the plebs don’t believe you
They are genuinely inhuman monsters.
Isn’t it that they just don’t care?
Nope. It’s active and malevolent.
I don’t care about most everyone on the planet, even if I had their resources I couldn’t summon up the fucks needed to be actively malicious in the way that they are. Not caring is Howard Hughes buying a TV station so he could watch whatever he damned well wanted, not filing a lawsuit because a state is improving it’s utilities which only vaguely undercuts you if even that.
you kidding? they’re demons, making your life worse is what they jerk off to.
I’m pretty sure they mostly do it for the profit.
I’m so fucking tired of living in this god damned dystopia.
Don’t worry, it ends eventually.
all bleeding stops 🙄
This time, it won’t.
this reads like an aged alchemist who is convinced he’s on the cusp of finding the philosopher’s stone
At this point I’d settle for a bezoar.
Do something about it then…
PS: maybe you are, if so, Kudos to you… but the majority seem to only rue it
Hey man I’m all ears. Give me something concrete to do.
Start talking to people. Tie them together in ways that dont include the state.
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i have some ideas of stuff to do with this
Maybe start with doing some research on the Internet yourself instead of asking random strangers from other countries to fix things for you.
Capitalism breeds innovation and advancement, folks!
Also didn’t Rupert Murdoch also stifle fiber adoption in Australia because better internet would cut into his TV and print empire there?
Why is it always this same recurring cast of 100 same rotating cunts over and over ? If we get rid of them, can we at least have fresh new cunts, this batch is extremely stale, LUIGI !!!
🧱🧱👽 🔫 🧱🧱🧘 🔫 🧱🧱🦵🏼 🔫I was reading a (non-fiction) book about Gallipoli, a battle that was fought in Turkey in 1915-16 during WWI. At one point, an Australian journalist by the name of “Keith Murdoch” shows up and starts contributing to the Allies’ failures and eventual withdrawal. And I was like “wait, is that?” and the answer was “yep”. Keith Murdoch was born in 1885 and was Rupert Murdoch’s (full name Keith Rupert Murdoch) father. Aside from helping to fuck up Gallipoli, Papa Murdoch led a smear campaign against Australia’s greatest WWI general (who just happened to be Jewish) and got him removed from command. The Murdoch name has been a stain on humanity for a long time.
Not all murdochs; there was that one who fought all those ninjas.
Kinda. Murdoch killed the NBN because Foxtel was not in a position to compete with fibre.
Musk is a toxic stink in this world.
the Trump administration ordered states to revise their plans with a “tech-neutral approach” and lower the average cost of serving each location
In other words don’t give the tax payer the best options you can, give them the cheapest options to implement you can.
This is absolute insanity. To think that fiber and satellites are even on the same playing field is absolute brain damage.
The problem I see is that we’ve already paid for fiber
Yep, $400bn wasted on fiber “deployments” that never went anywhere while telcos pocketed the cash, and that was as of like a decade ago.
And across the pond the french government spent 20bn to have the government build out fiber and now basically everyone in france has super cheap fiber internet.
Paying companies to do stuff that’s against their financial incentives doesn’t work.
We just got fiber 3 weeks ago. I pay for 600Mb/s and it is honestly the best internet I’ve had. I was afraid that we wouldn’t get it, but I was astonished when a salesman stopped by. I signed up that day. Lol
Reminds me of the German Telekom and their unceasing effort to slow down state subsidised fibre deployment.
The subsidies are primarily for towns left behind with bad ADSL (it was below 30mbit average and is now afaik 100mbit), that want to build their own local fibre nets cause nobody else does.
They seem to watch for construction permits and then swoop in and build a few fibre adsl distribution boxes or elevate a street or two with fibre to raise the average speed in town just above threshold. The local net looses the subsidies and usually stops construction or if already built only commercial customers are still allowed to be connected…
Reminds me of the German Telekom and their unceasing effort to slow down state subsidised fibre deploymen
Capitalism is a disease.
I love it when they reopen construction sites where cables from other carriers were recently buried (after Telekom said no) because NOW they want to provide their shit there too.
It would be a shame if some random accident were to befall those token distribution boxes…
DTAG should be a wholly state owned company again.
When we got cable TV and proper broadband internet with it, the previous company relying on the local monopoly got extremely pissed. Every of their services costed the multitude of what competitors, even on phone line, could offer. Most outrageous was ADSL. Competitor ADSL started at HUF5 000 for 384k download speed, topped at HUF15 000 for 2M, per month. The local provider? It started at HUF20 000, for a laughable 256k download speed. Explanation? The parent company thought it was a luxury, because you could just send a hand-written mail instead of the e-mail, get a dish TV with HBO and a tape recorder with a timer instead of torrenting movies, etc.
Why do we need to have debate with lobbyists and groups of that nature.
They have more $ than you and i, can buy their ways. How that shits not illegal is fucked. Guess it goes with insider trading for Congress, make laws for/against companies you’re invested in. USA is beyond rotten and corrupt from the inside. Blatant bribery with Tim cook delivering gold bars to the white house himself.
But they pose no comparison to requirements of what the city or community’s needs. Satellite is slower and pales in comparison to fiber.
But money, you think they care? As long as there is money, your needs mean fuck all.
That’s the magic hand of the market that all talk about…
Capitalist myth similar to how monarchs are chosen by gods. I swear, Americans are so propagandized to that they would chuck disabled people into volcanoes if the Koch brothers told them Jesus wanted them to.
This is libelous. We would chuck differently-abled people into volcanoes.
i hope elon dies and starlink goes bankrupt
I hope some hero gives him the UnitedHealth CEO treatment.
I hope he gets rectal cancer
Green hat good
Sig heil bad
I’d rather Starlink just be independent from Musk. There are people who just can not get a good Internet connection and rely on it, and other Satellite Internet companies are awful.
I hate Musk as much as the next person, but Starlink is brilliant and works well. If they got rid of Musk and stopped being dicks like they are with this, it’d be okay.
Id rather all this space trash burn up and we just spend the money on providing internet via land.
It’s still a good thing for cell coverage in remote areas for hiking emergencies though. The few satellites that currently do that are stupidly annoying and expensive to use. You have to carry specialized equipment, and if you use Garmin, you pay a yearly fee for the privilege of signing up for the low tier plan, then a monthly fee for the service, and then pay by the text message after the first few. Starlink just added T-Mobile so if you have a newer phone and use T-Mobile you can skip all of that and message out in emergencies without all that nonsense. Hopefully more brands will be added soon, but I don’t know.
Life is not safe. Adventure even less so. The loss of the night sky and the risk of Kessler syndrome is not outweighed by a slight convenience allowing influencers to stream video and hit social media while pretending to get away from it all.
What a weird hill to die on. Is it about letting people die or about influencers livestreaming?
What about comms during catastrophies? Small villages or off-grid houses? Remote research installations?
I swear, Lemmy is becoming more reactionary by the day.
There are several grave environmental and civil problems with Starlink and other proposed massive constellations:
- The threat to the ozone layer (when these low-orbiting sats start re-entering en masse in the next few years, we’re going to have more aluminum in the upper atmosphere than ever before - a known problem)
- Overcrowding of LEO - the choicest orbital space over this planet is finite. Satellites in low orbit have tremendous kinetic energy and do not (cannot) fly in formation, as they spread out vertically; not that Starlink is designed to. Kessler Syndrome catastrophe or not, the risk of collisions is increasing rapidly. As some researchers have put it, LEO is the “Wild West” right now, and it definitely needs to be regulated by international treaty.
- Light and radio pollution - aside from exacerbating the accelerating ecological damage from light pollution, this extends even to orbiting assets like the Hubble Telescope, which is already seeing interference from Starlink sats. I don’t see why SpaceX or any corporation, let alone nation, deserves to monopolize any part of the global environment this way. Astronomy and upper atmosphere research don’t need to justify their existence, particularly not in this situation… and yes, stargazers on this planet deserve the right to a “clean” night sky.
- Corporate squatting - Starlink is approaching the point of outnumbering all other extant satellites from all other nations, since the start of the space age, combined. Why do they get to crowd everyone else out?
- Vulnerability to the space environment - when the Sun acts up, Starlink sats have been disabled before, and in numbers. This is a threat to satellites in general (obviously), many of which are not shielded properly, but launching bunches of these satellites at once increases the threat sharply. I’m sure you’d agree that orbital debris is not something we should take lightly.
I could go on, but I trust you get the point. I don’t object to temporary small-scale deployments of satellite groups during catastrophes, but we simply don’t need the permanent deployment of tens of thousands of satellites that the US, Europe and China intend to launch for global internet coverage - that can be almost entirely achieved from the ground.
It’s about needless overreach. None of those reasons you listed justify constellations of 10k+ satellites in LEO just for internet access. That is an unmitigated global disaster in the making. Solutions to all of that exist. Radios work for comms in disasters right now and have for decades. Governments should simply run fiber to every small town and village. It’s far cheaper. If someone has an off-grid house, they know what they’re getting into. Remote research installations are a niche case and simply do not justify a global satellite network on their own, not when all the other cases listed fail to justify it as well. If they really need to upload data from deep afield, they could always put up a few dedicated satellites just for their own use.
If somebody wants to travel to or live and work in a remote area, that also doesn’t justify such a network. They’re doing that to get away, not to stay connected. They are taking the risks that come with it.
It’s not for streaming. As far as I know it’s just text messages. Absolutely agree we should not be using screen time when out and away. We just need that little bit of safety.
There are also hand held radios, strobelights, flares, and PLBs that do not require more satellite infrastructure.
People being lost in the wilderness is not a new problem. It often happens because people don’t bother to consider that they might get lost and plan appropriately.
Sorry, but not everyone gets to come home, especially if they don’t do a little planning.
People should learn to navigate if they’re going into the wilderness, and face the consequences if they don’t. People will call for additional safety until we all live in padded cells. Frankly, people could stand to face a lot more danger in this world. Maybe then idiots will stop trying to pet the bears at Yellowstone. There’s no need to litter the sky with satellites so that the incompetent can live a bit longer.
Ehhh agree that it frequently happens from poor planning, but I think we should do what we can to improve safety rather than blame victims. Learning about and paying for obscure satellite tech only helps those people who already know a lot about hiking, whereas this could bring the tech to everyone with a phone.
But also I think they could do it with a lot fewer satellites than this. They don’t need absolutely great coverage. Just a message service. The government could provide this on an emergency basis.
Not just for hiking emergencies.
Many of us in reasonably functioning democracies have had a few decades to forget that sometimes people want to destroy your civilian infrastructure. Far fewer of those people have the capability to disrupt a satellite grid.
Or we could just make satellite phone service more accessible? Without the need for thousands of pieces of space trash put into LEO? Nobody needs tiktok when they are climbing a mountain in a remote area.
I don’t know how much Musk can be separated from Starlink. Not only because Starlink, as part of SpaceX, is privately held but also because the main reason they now have a superior service to offer is that they got fucktons of money from government customers, which is also tied to Musk’s action
A big part of Musk’s involvement with politics is because everything he does, from EVs to rockets to, now, big energy-guzzling datacenters for AI, needs a lot of government backing, if not in terms of direct contracts at least in terms of regulation and incentives.
Even his direct involvement with Trump wasn’t because he suddenly became a Nazi (he’s probably always been one, according to his own family) but in order to become even more entangled with government investments, even trying to control NASA directly.
And not only US governments. I remember Musk suddenly being everywhere in Europe pitching Starlink. Meloni’s government in Italy was grilled for allegedly agreeing on a big contract with Starlink.
but not in this order, the reverse would be so much more satisfying
