I'm not too sure about this, given the highly limited market options and high regulation of space travel, I'm guessing they'd be hit with anti-trust laws pretty quickly.

Yeah but with the volume we're talking about here, SpaceX is definitely going to be extremely constrained by launch capacity. I doubt they'd be hit with any antitrust lawsuit over not cancelling their own launches in order to take orders from their competitors. In any case, there's no chance that all of those companies are going to be able to launch their constellations in anywhere close to their targeted timeframes. There's just not enough launch capacity in the world to handle that in such a short amount of time.

My impression of the Starlink project is that it's at least in part a backup project for unused launch capacity.

That is, if they happen to not find paying customers for all their reusable launch fleet, this is a way for it to not stand around idle.

Under this theory, paying customers will always get precedent over throwing up another 44 satellites.

>> I'm not too sure about this, given the highly limited market options and high regulation of space travel

The government grants monopolies (patent) on very important things (drugs and treatments for all sorts of things) and then lets companies charge different rates to different customers - even higher prices to the uninsured. It seems unlikely they'd make SpaceX launch for a competitor at anywhere near their own cost. But then politics....

They get to launch* their own stuff for only the rocket cost, that part is fine.

I mean if they have Boeing, NASA, etc. as paying customers at a standard $X they can't just go "Well Google you're launching a competitor to us so we're gonna charge you 20 * $X instead to prevent you from launching".

And Samsung can stop selling apple screens. But they don't, because they realize they need the revenue for things later on.