As a person who lives in the third world I absolutely do not want the internet to only be controlled by American corporations from space and would much rather fund proper fiber optics and connections.
Ah. Yeah, I guess that’s true. It is an American thing. Would you feel better if it was European or Chinese?
Wire infrastructure is great, but it’s just damn expensive, and manufacturing+laying it can be very specialised labour. Even here in Canada not everyone has it in rural areas. Meanwhile, small satellite swarms pass over everywhere by force of geometry, and are actually still pretty fast internet.
Not really, but of that list only China hasn’t directly colonized the country I live or send storm troopers into the forest to murder people in the past decade. I would like the taxes we pay here to go towards developing ourselves, we can pay to educate networking engineers and subsidize the work ourselves and hook into the internet as a peer instead of as a subscriber. Third world countries aren’t poor because we have no money, we’re poor because we’re trapped in bad loan agreements, have lopsided international investment and bad interior planning which prefers plantation cash crops over food security.
Starlink is probably a stopgap measure for areas that still have to build up the physical infrastructure for the real solution.
It’s more of a solution for having internet available just about anywhere. Probably good for various emergency/rescue scenarios.
I still don’t want the Americans to be controlling literally anything I use or interact with. They will harvest that data to execute military operations against leftists where I live. No fucking thanks, keep your Starlink.
