How about new potentials for humanity, I don't give a damn how it helps businesses or helps Wall Street crooks.

new business models != corporate crooks maybe ar greeters from uganda?

For us non-Americans this is not that great. How would you feel if China or Russia launched such a system? Or even Germany?

This is a commercial, privately owned, satellite network. It will probably be available world wide, at least that seems to be the plan. You could compare it to Microsoft, with many critical infrastructure worldwide depending on Windows. Also, a lot of the fiber used for the internet is provided by private companies, a very important network being owned by an Indian company.

Then, there are already multiple satellite networks for positioning (GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, BDS). Then there are a bunch of spy satellites.

So I don't really understand the problem for non-Americans, which I am too.

> You could compare it to Microsoft, with many critical infrastructure worldwide depending on Windows.

We can compare it to Windows, and the end result is exactly the same: not great.

Why would I feel anything but good about this?

At the worst it doesn't impact me at all, at best it means a large number of people are going to be able to get online for cheap who previously weren't.

Given the cesspool of trolls, advertisements, fake media, bullshit social media (all of it), mass surveillance, the harvesting and sale of your personal information at every turn, and what is essentially unchecked psychological warfare taking place all across the net, I'm not sure just dumping people on it is the best thing

I'm not denying the bad things the Internet brings but are you saying because of those things you listed, it's better to have remote/poor people with limited access in third world countries remain disconnected?

Why not look at this from a humanity perspective? Imagine connectivity being extremely fast, reliable and cheap for all? Isn't that a good thing? Why is this even debatable as not a good thing? It's like debating if electricity is a good thing or not for all. Yah duh it is. I guess if its improperly used maybe. But that's the only argument IMO.

A large number of people moving to this network means a majority of the internet is routed via the United States. Local service providers will die out and in the end the internet is owned and operated by one corporation which is willing/required to hand over anything to the state. Total surveillance, total control. This is a nightmare.

I'm not sure that's true.

From a technical perspective, from what i've seen SpaceX is planning on eventually having them communicate as a web across themselves. So your "average" communication will be something like "user>base station>sat>sat>sat>base station near destination>destination". Or if the destination is nearby, something like "user>base station>sat>base station>destination"

I haven't seen anything claiming that they are going to route all internet through the US. I've actually seen the opposite about how they are planning on using this system to do intercontinental communication at faster latency than undersea fiber can currently do. And to me that implies that they will be taking the most optimal path, which means if neither the source nor the destination is in the US, the communication wouldn't have any reason to enter the US.

From a legal/political perspective I could see where you are coming from. It's a US based company, and they comply with US laws, so if push comes to shove they are going to do what the US requires them to. But I very much doubt that SpaceX will end up being a monopoly on internet access. They aren't the only player in this game (OneWeb and Eutelsat are 2 others I know off the top of my head that are working on similar products), and even if they were to become the only "fast satellite internet" company, they aren't targeting "all the internet".

For the foreseeable future, the base stations required to communicate with Starlink are expected to be large and power hungry enough that you won't see them in cars or phones or anything super mobile. They hope to get it down to the size of a pizza-box one day. They also don't have the bandwidth to handle all the world's internet access, and likely won't ever have that much bandwidth. Fiber in the ground is still significantly cheaper, faster (unless you are talking intercontinental), and more reliable for most usecases.

If things start to look like they could possibly end up at a total monopoly by SpaceX as "the internet company", i'd be right there with you about how this could be a nightmare. But i just don't see that happening, and until it does this is just another ISP.