A year ago I would've agreed with you, but Starlink's revenue is up 600% YoY. There's enough money in Starlink for SpaceX to not risk it.
I don't know why they allow it. Perhaps a sign of good faith to keep regulators off their backs?
$10M per launch. By comparison, Starlink has had over 100 launches:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Starlink_and_Starshiel...
AT&T doing the same number of launches would generate over $1B in profit.
And again, Starlink is already competing with land-based cellular networks, and so would AT&T. So the bulk of the AT&T satellite customers could come at the expense of other land-based cellular networks rather than Starlink -- Starlink has ~2M users compared to >140M for Verizon Wireless (much less carriers in other countries), so who are they really competing with?
A year ago I would've agreed with you, but Starlink's revenue is up 600% YoY. There's enough money in Starlink for SpaceX to not risk it.
The problem of using a purely profit oriented analysis is that you missed major pieces of the puzzle. Antitrust action would be one reason that you neglected. Another reason is SpaceX's mission, which is the colonization of Mars. To do that, SpaceX need to help bootstrap an entire space economy from scratch to make colonization more than a pipe dream.
1. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/23/spacex-raises-prices-for-lau...
This would require AT&T to acquire local spectrum, since they (to my knowledge) don't any global spectrum.
And at that point, it seems to make much more sense for a local carrier to partner with AST instead, since they'd be able to serve almost everybody using their existing terrestrial coverage and would need to use the satellites only to fill in the gaps.
> Starlink themselves might lose a few customers to AT&T but not as much as the profit on the launch contract, so why do they want to stop it?
Theoretically they could try to keep competing satellite operators out of the direct-to-cell market for as long as possible. Being able to set the price for that for all operators in a country as the only seller sounds extremely beneficial in the short term.
But that would inevitably attract both space launch competitors and antitrust regulators around the globe, which might ultimately be worse for SpaceX.
Which is irrelevant to the point that if AST is competing with "Starlink" in those countries, they'll also be competing with (and presumably getting most of their users from) other local carriers.
> Being able to set the price for that for all operators in a country as the only seller sounds extremely beneficial in the short term.
Except that hardly anybody is going to be willing to pay significantly more than that than they could pay to get similar service from a terrestrial local carrier, so there was never really a monopoly rent to be had to begin with.
If they were going to do this then why would they wait?
They don't need to. The launch contract is where the profit is. Starlink is already competing with AT&T's ground network and has to maintain competitive pricing there regardless of whether there is a competing satellite network.
AT&T benefits because they can stop maintaining ground infrastructure in rural locations and still compete for customers who care about it, and expand coverage to other countries, much of which will come at the expense of local carriers in those countries rather than Starlink.
Starlink themselves might lose a few customers to AT&T but not as much as the profit on the launch contract, so why do they want to stop it?