It's certainly not impossible, but I would be surprised if the economics of satellite based internet can compete with fibre based networks. The areas where fibre isn't feasible are also probably the areas with few people, and so the potential to make money is limited.
Iridium has shown that (once you disregard capital costs), there is a niche for satellite based telecom services, but it's a fairly niche area.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_Communications_Inc.
The reason why news broadcasts have such horrible latency has more to do with compression windows for older video codecs than broadcast latency.
I was being lazy and pulled my numbers from wikipedia.[1] It seems that the calculation there takes into account latitude of the transmitter and receiver, and so gives a slightly larger number. For non-equatorial ground stations, latency is higher.
In the context of communications, it's important to clarify what "round trip" means. The latency to send data from one ground station to another is, at best, 240 ms, but the time taken to request data and then receive it is going to be twice that. In practice it means that if you were browsing the web over a geostationary satellite link, it would take 1/2s between clicking a link and receiving the first data back from the server.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_orbit#Communicati...
Perhaps the protocols they're developing will have use for ground level civilian communications, but it's unlikely that satellite based internet will ever see widespread adoption in the west because of latency.