High on cyberspace: Satellite hopes meet internet reality

But the companies involved and people excited about satellite internet tend to overstate how much good it can realistically do. There are limits to the technology, and structural barriers to internet access cannot be solved by technology alone.

The pandemic has helped focus the attention of many people, companies and governments on making internet access an essential utility like electricity or clean water. That cannot happen unless everyone works together to improve government internet policies, reduce economic and social barriers to internet access, and take on all the other human challenges of bringing more of the world online.

I’m encouraged by satellite internet technology, and I regularly hear from readers who feel the same. But let me dig into both the limits of satellite internet services, and the sometimes short-sighted focus on technology alone.

Tech problems are also far from the only reasons so many people aren’t using the internet. It’s about ineffective government policies, social and economic inequalities, entrenched corporate interests, and people who have more pressing needs than being online.

And yet satellite internet executives like Musk and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos rarely talk about addressing those broader challenges, nor do they tend to portray themselves as a small piece of a collaborative mission to make the internet more accessible, affordable and relevant.

Musk has been tweeting in the last few days about his taxes and the return flight of astronauts inside a SpaceX capsule. He hasn’t said a word that I could find about the U.S. infrastructure bill, which includes $65 billion in fresh taxpayer funding to try to bring more Americans online (although, like many U.S. internet companies, Starlink gets a lot of government funding).

The bulk of the new taxpayer money will be grants for state and local governments to spend on small-scale projects that they believe are best to expand internet service. 

Some states, including Virginia and Minnesota, have a track record of backing effective projects to get more people online, Anna Read, a senior officer at the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Broadband Access Initiative, told me. Inch-by-inch improvement is a frustrating but probably necessary piece of expanding internet access. 

And it would help if the powerful people and companies behind satellite internet projects saw the bigger picture as part of their work, too.

What if Musk threw his support behind the teenagers in Baltimore who successfully campaigned for free internet service for their neighbours? What if Amazon’s satellite-internet executives also drew attention to the high cost of mobile internet service in sub-Saharan Africa? What if Boeing used its lobbying power in Washington to compel lawmakers to say no to big internet providers that often stand in the way of effective online policies?

Everyone I just mentioned has the same stated goal: to knock down barriers to get more people online. It’s the satellite executives, however, who tend to behave like they operate in an innovation vacuum separate from the realities of Earth.