Starlink's total bandwidth is about the same as a small regional ISP. There is no way it will ever "control the world's internet".
Starlink will serve many places where terrestrial wired or wireless access doesn't make sense, including oceans, very rural areas, uninhabited areas, airplanes, rockets, etc. It will never be able to serve 1% of a high density city. It will never control anything on the scale of the world's internet. This is an absurd conspiracy theory.
There's no source or confirmation that 1,300 units were actually down, and, if they were down - it looks like because the service wasn't being paid for?
Do you expect companies to provide services for free? The hypocrisy that Elon pointed out is that the military industrial complex is getting paid billions, but the ideological mob via captured MSM is smearing him for no longer wanting to provide free/subsidized services?
P.S. Their "withdrepw" typo in the article, doesn't bode well for overall quality.
Edit to add: Found another source confirming the units were down, oh - and look at that - it was due to non-payment. People demonizing Musk for war mongerers not paying their bills eh? Let the smear campaigns continue..
"Blackmail" is a strange word for "we decided to stop paying the monthly service fee and service ended as expected."
> Before the terminals went completely dark, Ukraine's Ministry of Defense made a request in early October to their British counterparts to pick up the $3.25 million monthly bill. The batch of terminals were also rotated out as concerns grew that service could be turned off, in order to minimize the impact, the source said.
> A British official said after discussions between the ministries "it was agreed there were higher priority military capabilities." Among many other channels of support, the UK has been flying thousands of Ukrainian troops to Britain for training before they head back to the frontlines.
It's possible for a perfectly reasonable person to justifiably strongly dislike Elon Musk, but what you're doing here is not that.
I think it's similar to small construction companies using their staff during the winter to work on the owner's new rental properties.
They can easily scale it up or down depending on how other projects/priorities are going and how many people don't have tasks to do. All of the deadlines and KPIs are internal and they don't expose themselves to lawsuits or financial penalties when they have to delay something.
In the case of spacex, it's even more beneficial because they need to launch rockets anyway for testing. Sending them to space empty is a wasted opportunity.
Starlink has massive DoD potential, like it or not. Also could be big for banking. Their client facing aspect of it will eventually just be piggybacking off of those two industries.
Starlink will serve many places where terrestrial wired or wireless access doesn't make sense, including oceans, very rural areas, uninhabited areas, airplanes, rockets, etc. It will never be able to serve 1% of a high density city. It will never control anything on the scale of the world's internet. This is an absurd conspiracy theory.