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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.
“Starlink is too congested to handle meaningful load at scale so they’re quietly hitting people with $750-$1500 ‘demand surcharges,'” Bode wrote in a recent post on Bluesky. Even worse, those who are trying to contest these charges are facing a “black hole,” since SpaceX doesn’t “invest in customer service.”
The development highlights some considerable shortcomings that satellite-based internet has over physical broadband infrastructure back on the ground, including fiber. It’s a particularly controversial conversation, considering Musk’s extremely cozy relationship with US regulators. Efforts to ensure fiber internet access, particularly in rural America, continue to fall flat — or be defunded altogether — as SpaceX is awarded government contract after government contract.
Just this week, the FCC announced it was looking to accelerate approvals for next-generation satellite broadband launches, another major regulatory win for SpaceX.
Meanwhile, fuming Starlink customers are taking to social media to vent their frustrations.
“I have been charged 1,500 dollars demand surcharge for simply verifying my address that I have subscribe to three years ago,” one disgruntled customer wrote in a Reddit post. “I have contacted Starlink customer support but it’s pretty worthless. I have been getting tossed from one agent to another agent for the past five days.”
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