> The US Government should nationalize Starlink and provide all Americans with internet service.

This is a repeated trope and more ridiculous each time I hear it. Starlink is a private company that is in the business of selling the US Government as well as consumers its services. You can't just "nationalize" it on a whim; after all, the US isn't Cuba.

GPS was always owned and operated by the US military so it's an apples and oranges comparison at best.

I keep seeing people saying what the government can and can not do. Most of the things that I've been told it "cannot do" it clearly "has been doing".

You seem so alarmed by my proposition to nationalize a private company. Would you have been so alarmed if the government were punishing people for crimes without due process?

> You can't just "nationalize" it on a whim;

Governments can do exactly that. The legislature can change the law to enable it if necessary.

> the US isn't Cuba.

it is not just communist countries that nationalised things. Much of Europe did up to the 1970s, lots of Asian democracies did.

> it is not just communist countries that nationalised things. Much of Europe did up to the 1970s, lots of Asian democracies did.

I suspect you're about to have your eyes opened to just how the american right feels about pre-neoliberal europe and asia.

I already knew, but rapid downvotes on HN which is relatively rational surprised me.

There was a lovely radio interview of Neil Kinnock (former leader of the British Labour Party) many years ago in which he described the reactions of some Americans to him being a socialist (and not the British equivalent of the Democrats). One woman said "You can't be socialists, you're too nice".

I’m not sure that comparision makes sense. The magic of GPS is that it is one way. The satelites send signals and the ground receivers receive them. There space and control segment doesn’t know and doesn’t care how many users there are. Their job remained the exact same even after GPS was allowed to be used for civilian applications.

In other words GPS scales very flat. Launching the constellation costs X, control activities cost Y per month. And those prices don’t change if there is only a single receiver, a thousand, or a billion. Basically allowing GPS to be used by civilians didn’t cost them any extra on top of what they were already paying to keep it operational for the military. Plus there is no natural limit on how many gps receivers there can be.

This is not the same for Starlink. There user stations have a two way connection with the satelites. The system have very real limits on how many users it can serve. And every new user cost something to the provider. Because of this the government would need to manage who can have access and how much they can use the constellation. That would be a nightmare to manage for a government and everyone would be unhappy with them. In short: not a good idea.

Is there really even a risk of orbit pollution from multiple GPS satellite companies?

GPS has only 31 satellites and they orbit at a far distance of like 12,550 miles from earth.

Starlink alone has over 7000 satellites and plans for 12,000 by 2026 and possibly 30,000 beyond that. And they orbit at a distance of 340-382 miles.

You could have thousands of GPS satellite companies before even matching the orbit pollution of Starlink alone.

I am not saying that satellite internet shouldn't be done by a singular governmental org. But to say the reason they did it was to prevent un-necessary orbit pollution doesn't seem like a very strong reason.

I think that it was done because it doesn't really cost anything to allow the GPS signals to be used by everyone, and because it costs a lot to launch satellites.

Internet satellites are a whole different story because they deal with signal bandwidth limits in both directions, so there is a cost per user added to use them.

This, but comes with X/Twitter & democracy pre-installed.