Starlink is comparable to Iridium if you are discussing ‘internet from the sky’ but the details are more complex.

Shipping tracking to reduce black market exchanges and human/drug trafficking.

Also, without starlink Ukraine has said they would have been defeated quite quickly. (Ie fighting without a gun).

There are many upsides.

Ah so you can attach a cable to a plane? Or a ship? If it achieves nothing, why is there global demand?

The simple fact it, it is superior in many ways for a huge number of application and just denying the is never work.

As for the 'visual pollution' its mostly just not true. For the waste majority of humans its invisible basically always outside of a few situations.

For most terrestrial telescopes it doesn't really matter much. Broad visual surveying telescopes take a slight hit but its not like they will be no longer working. Many of the issues SpaceX has addressed and made the problem way less impactful.

Some very sensitive radio telescopes are also slightly effect and having some regulation like we do on earth for electronic devices would make sense.

The idea that its some horrible thing just doesn't hold up. The benefits outweigh the cost by a gigantic amount. Starlink is used to give good internet to native Americans who life away from infrastructure. The worth of these things are far, far, far higher then the few 10s of millions we lose in observatory performance.

I personally have good internet access because of Starlink. Before that I had very poor options. Living outside of a metro area is a nightmare for internet access. People living in cities take it for granted but it's a complete game changer for my entire neighborhood. Big corps treated us like shit and wanted exorbitant amounts of money to run cables to us.

How is providing access to the internet not an awesome thing for society?

There are millions of people in my same situation for which this system is doing good.

Also airplanes and light from cities pollute the sky infinitely more than these satellites do.

>it a achieves nothing we don't already have terrestrially

Sorry, but this is a very first world, urban perspective. Please have a little empathy. I live in the US and have only one choice for internet from home and it is lousy. Starlink has been a dramatic change for us. This is the situation for many, many people in the US and around the world.

Starlink is absolutely offering something that is NOT available terrestrially.