SpaceX CEO Elon Musk maintains an extremely close relationship with Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr.
Under Carr’s leadership, Musk’s rocket company has effectively been given carte blanche in its efforts to roll out its orbital Starlink broadband service to more Americans, a glaring conflict of interest that could have profound implications for society.
That’s despite concerns over thousands or even millions of satellites cluttering our planet’s already extremely busy orbit and the environmentally damaging rocket launches that send them up.
And the space-based network is already starting to experience some major strains — as some experts have long predicted. It’s a lesson some Starlink customers are finding out the hard way. As TechDirt‘s Karl Bode highlighted, SpaceX is now charging some users so-called “demand surcharges” of up to $1,500, simply because their address is within a high demand area.
