October 7, 2024 ☼ The Intersection ☼ Information Age ☼ Space
Global governance must catch up with the pace of technological development in spacefaring and satellite communications
This is an unedited cut of The Intersection column that appears every other Monday in Mint.
When the man who runs Tesla, SpaceX and the social media platform X announced last month that his company “now constitutes roughly 2/3 of all active Earth satellites”, my instinctive reaction was one of shock and misgiving. How did such a situation come to pass? An extreme concentration of market power ought to have triggered alarms among competition regulators. They would have acted if a single firm controlled two-thirds of say, the telecom, banking or road transport markets in a single country. That a single firm has come to dominate the orbital space around the entire planet is a marked failure of global governance.
The failure becomes all the more acute when Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and CEO has been quite open about turning his market power into political influence. Indeed, Musk’s behaviour reminds us just why liberal democracies must have effective competition laws. Anti-trust regulations and competition watchdogs do not exist merely to protect consumers from monopolies and cartels. Rather, the deeper purpose of competition policy is to ensure that no single entity amasses so much economic power that it can capture policy and undermine democracy itself. Musk’s partisan use of the social media platform to promote his political preferences brings into the open what is mostly done behind closed doors. He has used his control over his platforms to overrule Ukraine’s military decisions and more recently, refused to comply with the decisions of the Brazilian Supreme Court. Every sovereign state should reflect on just how we have arrived at such a state of affairs.
Even if SpaceX was run by a team of colourless and faceless managers, the fact that it dominates the satellite market is a serious global concern. Now it is true that SpaceX has become the biggest player in the satellite business through a commendable combination of entrepreneurship, innovation and visionary leadership. But it is also true that it did so on the back of the financial and policy support of the US government. American politicians and policymakers might believe that promoting a homegrown champion is in their national interest. Yet a situation where a single American company already has captured such a big share of space infrastructure is not in anyone else’s interests.
Indeed, even American policymakers have begun to realise that it might not be in their own public interest. Last month, Jessica Rosenworcel, the chairperson of the US Federal Communications Commission worried that “We do have one player that’s got almost two-thirds of the satellites that are in space right now and has a very high portion of internet traffic,” and that space should not be an exception to competition considerations. I am not sure how seriously the US government will pursue this line of thinking. Many wealthy tech industry figures are lobbying against regulation and in any case, an issue of global interest should not be determined by American politics alone.
Part of the reason why SpaceX’s Starlink constellation has managed to put over 7000 satellites in low-earth orbit (LEO) is because orbital slots are allocated on what is effectively a first-come first-serve basis. With the Falcon reusable launch vehicle, the company is able to put hundreds of satellites in orbit each month. Starlink aims at an eventual constellation size of 42,000 LEO satellites providing global coverage and acquiring a dominant share of the world’s internet traffic. Other than being first to claim those slots, it pays nothing to use humanity’s shared resource. Chinese authorities have recognised the military strategic and political implications and want to put 40,000 of their own satellites in orbit in the coming decade. The other constellation, including OneWeb in which Bharti Global is a shareholder, will have several thousand satellites. This is not competition in a real sense because billions of people will not have a choice. Those who do will have decide which is the lesser evil.
Unlike LEO slots, the radio spectrum that satellites need to communicate with each other and with earth stations is assigned by an international body. The ITU’s radio regulations govern the allocation and assignment of spectrum and the rules of its use. Starlink is lobbying the FCC to get the ITU to change these rules to allow it to operate at higher power, arguing that this will improve coverage and connection speed. However, this comes at the cost of other users, especially geostationary satellites (GEO) that occupy slots at much higher altitudes. Meanwhile astrophysicists and astronomers have been upset about visible and radio-frequency pollution from LEO satellites. In other words, as much as LEO constellations provide valuable connectivity to humankind, there are competing uses of space and radio spectrum that need wider international deliberation. The world should not allow itself to be railroaded by SpaceX, the Chinese government and other constellation operators.
India is one of the players with the ability to shape global rules for the use of space. We should use it to ensure that space remains humanity’s common resource. Space and telecom policy should come together to ensure that the satellite communications market is competitive. One part of the answer to that is multiple homegrown constellations that can compete in this space. The other part is to remember what the East India Company did to us.
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