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Comment by herbst | Hacker News Reader

Is there any reason we need several private companies doing their own thing instead of making this a world wide project where every company can buy in?

I mean sure nobody would have done anything like that without Starlink. But it's like every mobile provider would setup their own antennas in a way.

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In a broader sense, I think that redundant competing efforts to accomplish the same task is a much more reliable path to success.

This worked for GPS [0] because it was conceived as a purely military project (and still is mostly). Once established, it was opened up to civilian and commercial uses. But even so, other countries and supra-national organizations decided they needed their own navigation satellite systems, and now we have Galileo [1] and Beidou [2].

Maybe if the military had done this first, a similar path would follow (not likely though). As it is, the military is planning their own massive LEO satellite system [3].

[0]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System [1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_(satellite_navigation) [2]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeiDou [3]. https://www.sda.mil/us-military-places-a-bet-on-leo-for-spac...

Also GLONASS (Sovient/Russian) and a couple of regional systems from India and Japan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_navigation

You are getting downvoted but this is 100% true. Imagine if every maps provider or weather app had to launch their own satellites to offer basic functionality. A large collective investment into core infrastructure benefits everyone. Not every aspect of life needs to be a privatized free for all.

Yeah. I too totally realize that this is simply how competition works and prolly even leads to a more competitive and better market. Our mobile market is a expensive mess because of the regulation.

I understand all of that. I guess it's just wishful thinking that this could be one thing where the world gets their shit together.

It might be a more efficient network if it were a single system.

However, having the option to switch networks increases the efficiency of administration, customer service, etc.

Competition is the best way to produce desired outcomes.

While this is true in a way it is to simple. Ex. Health care, heavily regulated in Europe and hell we are glad it is if the free market would be something like in the U.S. Or credit card fees, there is to little competition in the free market we (Europeans) are glad that the fees are somewhat regulated and therefore much lower. And honestly our local internet and mobile market is not bad either, sure a more open market could lower the prices but private companies would have no interest bringing fiber or proper 4g or 5g in regions with only a handful of people, but there is. Germany for example has bad internet coverage and they given away most of the responsibility to private companies

TL:Dr it's not black and white

Yea, competition doesn't work when there are market failures. There is no competition is the us healthcare market because pricing is opaque and consumers have very limited information compared to doctors. Natural monopolies like wired internet can't have competition either.

I don't see how satellite internet falls victim to such egregious market failures.

Various reasons - capitalism, the degraded ability of bureaucracies to manage things compared to agile private enterprises as technology improves, conflicts of interest between nation states, and so forth. Government is not a great mechanism to drive innovation by itself, especially cooperative multi-state efforts. Things are better managed by governments setting good rules in place and private sector entities doing whatever they can to profit within the bounds of those rules.

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