I'm not sure that's true. The big player, Hughesnet, has satellites in geosynchronous orbit over the US. You can't "see" those from China.

SpaceX's plan is unique in that they aren't planning to run satellites in fixed, geosync orbit, to my knowledge nobody is doing that yet.

No, it is true. There are many, many satellite internet (VSAT) network operators. These are companies that lease bandwidth from the satellite owners and operate a network within the confines of the lease. The concept that is being discussed is landing rights, where a satellite operator is not allowed to import or sell their products in a country. There is also a matter of coordination, which means that countries with satellite systems that are higher up in the first-come-first-serve international regulatory list can object to those that come after them.

From a regulatory perspective, SpaceX is not not doing anything that Iridium, GlobalStar, Inmarsat, Intelsat, SES, etc...have not already dealt with.

No, from a regulatory perspective and technically this is a very different thing. Aiming at LEO and MEO satellites that move across the sky is very different than aiming a fixed-mount VSAT dish at a geostationary location. I've built large C and Ku band earth stations and worked with some of the largest teleports on the planet. This is something new and novel.

The SpaceX concept intends to use phased array/software beam steered antenna systems for the individual end user CPEs.

If you're lumping Globalstar (a mostly epic failure of LEO bent pipe low bitrate satellite constellation) in with SES (a company that operates $200m, 4000 to 6000 kilogram sized geostationary C/Ku/Ka band satellites and is highly successful worldwide), you're grossly misinformed, they are totally different architectures.

Technical architecture is independent of regulatory frameworks. The ITU simply sees this system as a non-geostationary system. The only alternative is geostationary. The parent was connecting on novel regulations which would need to be enacted, but new regulations are not necessary as existing ones cover this new system just as they do old ones.

geostationary satellite already exists. This is a very different thing.

MEO by o3b already exists, has been running for a few years, but is only available for larger telecoms and ISPs (example: a telecom in a pacific island nation state that doesn't have any submarine fiber). It's a great technology but the minimum size terminal is a pair of motorized, tracking 1.8m size antennas. It's an alternative to multi-ten-thousand-dollar-per-month C and Ku band transponder kHz and MHz.

Nothing like this already exists.