Next year it's likely the Senate will have changed hands, so the likelihood of the program still existing is low.

That's like telling the winner of a sports tournament that sorry, the prize you were promised is gone. But we might have another tournament next year, so that's OK.

Starlink is going to sue over this, and they'll win. By 2028 Starlink expects to have two orders of magnitude more capacity than they do now. 15x as many satellites, with an order of magnitude more capacity per satellite.

But Starlink didn't win the sports tournament this year, they didn't meet the performance obligations.

and an order of magnitude (or more) more subscribers. they're likely going to fall far short on the launch cadence (as they have) and subscriber demand isn't going away.

This program started under the previous administration. Overall these subsidies have been around forever and will likely continue. Here’s a negative take on the status quo that runs through the history up to this program:

https://techpolicyinstitute.org/publications/broadband/rural...

Personally I think this falls into the category of “if it’s worth doing it’s worth doing poorly.” I actually think that having 100/20 as a benchmark is good and that Starlink will get there. Is it close enough to be an improvement over Hughsnet and 56k modems? Yes. Even at 20 up, 10 down it’s more usable.

Anything Elon Musk touches invites controversy these days so boring policy issues like this get a new life of their own.

If this were Comcast being shown the door we’d all be cheering. For example: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/08/man-who-built-is...

Why do you think this? The FCC was handing out tons of cash to rural ISPs under Trump & a Republican congress. Improving rural internet is popular and well supported among the republicans since lots of rural areas are pretty red.

plus Musk is against subsidies and government intervention