By KIM BELLARD
Let’s say your favorite social media platform is bought by a right wing trillionaire, who espouses free speech, but only when it echoes his. You can switch to, say, Threads, but – whoops – that’s owned by Mark Zuckerberg, another of the super-rich who have turned to the right. There’s always Facebook but – damn! – Zucked again! So you migrate to Bluesky, where the discourse is more civil but the audiences admittedly smaller. At least you have some choices.
Not so much if, say, you are the President of Ukraine. Ukraine has unexpectedly held off the much bigger Russia for over four years now, in the process reinventing modern warfare by turning it from the traditional men, tanks, and artillery to a technology-powered war, especially with drones. To do so, it relied heavily on Starlink and its Pentagon-version Starshield. Unfortunately, Ukraine was blindsided a couple weeks ago when Starlink speeds were drastically lowered. Drones were literally falling out of the sky.
President Zelensky raised the alarm. Secretary of State Rubio said he thought software “glitches” were to blame, but most people suspected either Starlink’s owner Elon Musk and/or President Trump. Mr. Musk pointed fingers at the Pentagon, President Trump blamed Mr. Musk, and for several days Ukraine was hampered. Finally Mr. Musk admitted he’d ordered the slowdown, saying Ukraine had violated the “terms of service” of the service, using it “for offensive drone strikes to kill people.”
Note that Serhii Beskrestnov, a Ukrainian presidential adviser on military technology, wrote on social media “we are PHYSICALLY UNABLE TO USE COMMERCIAL STARLINK for deep strikes or medium-range strikes.”
The “loophole was closed last week,” according to both Mr. Musk and President Zelensky, with normal speeds resumed, but if you were President Zelensky you’d sure have to be looking for alternatives, as you’d never know when the equally mercurial Mr. Musk or President Trump might pull another Lucy on you (Gen Z: check your “Peanuts” references).
Unfortunately, there really aren’t any, and that’s a problem.
One might expect that another one of the newly MAGA super-rich who is into space – e.g., Jeff Bezos – might have filled this space (pun intended), and you’d be partly right. Amazon has been working on Project Kuiper – now Project Leo – for years now, and now his space company Blue Origin has launched TeraWave, offering “space-based communications.” Unfortunately, despite all his and Amazon’s money, neither is ready for primetime; Leo has fewer than two hundred satellites in orbit, and TeraWave won’t even launch until late 2027. So President Zelensky better be looking elsewhere.
Accordingly, Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense signed a letter of intent with Finnish companies Nokia and ICEYE “to develop new defense and satellite communication capabilities.” President Zelensky acknowledged: “Modern warfare has proven that reliable communications are a matter of national security. We must all rely on capabilities that we can control.”
Rafal Modrzewski, CEO and Co-founder of ICEYE, agrees: “Ukraine needs secure, sovereign and high-performance satellite communications systems that it controls. We have a proven track record of delivering sovereign missions at speed to help build that capability.”
President Zelensky has also met with leaders in Norway to develop new satellite communications capabilities, along with air defense systems. And he told reporters Ukraine has its own plans: “There are developments. We are working on the same [similar to] Starlink.” Ironically, though, it would require SpaceX to launch the satellites. That may be a big problem. Chad Anderson, founder and CEO of venture capital firm Space Capital, told CNBC: “Capital isn’t the constraint any more. Launch is.”
European leaders are watching the U.S. turn its back on allies with alarm, and it is no surprise that they realize they can’t be dependent on Starlink either. The European Union already has Govsatcom, which went live with initial services in January of this year and expects to offer commercial services early next year, potentially extending them to Ukraine.
Merien ten Houten writes in Innovation Origins that Europe is working on at least three alternatives to it: the IRIS² project, its own secure satellite network; Project Bromo, planned merger of the space and satellite divisions of Airbus, Thales and Leonardo to create a SpaceX competitor; a planned consortium of Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica and Vodafone to create a satellite-based network for mobile phones.
Obviously, none of these are anywhere near being ready to help Ukraine, or anyone else. IRIS² is furthest along, and it won’t launch until at least 2029.
Canada has its own concerns about dependencies on U.S. capabilities, and so it has awarded Toronto-based Telesat a contract to “strengthen secure and reliable military communications.” Telesat plans to have Telesat Lightspeed, a global low-Earth-orbit high-speed broadband network, operational by first quarter 2028, with a first launch later this year. The company told Cybernews that, although its primary customer is the Canadian Armed Forces, it expects to offer its services to NATO and other partners, including Ukraine.
All that sounds very promising, but it leaves President Zelensky knowing he is still dependent on the U.S. and Starlink for the foreseeable future.
I have to confess, I don’t quite understand how, in a nation, in a world, of supposed capitalists and rich venture capital firms, Starlink has such a monopoly. I understand even less how SpaceX has not only built such a lead in space launch capabilities but is also allowed to own a satellite service that depends on launch capabilities. Talk about building a moat to competitors. Talk about monopolistic practices.
Similarly, if Russia were to invade Netherlands, or China Taiwan, taking over, respectively, ASML and TSMC, the rest of the world’s chip-making abilities would fall back to the 20th century.
And, gosh, last week we discovered that an AI-discovered flaw in a programming language most of us had never heard of – PHP – exposed as much as 70% of the web to attack, forcing many sites to shut down to fix the flaw before hackers exploit it. The point of the internet was to be resilient and redundant, so having 70% of its websites with the same vulnerability sure seems like a problem.
If you work in healthcare, think about what will happen when – not if – AI discovers a critical security flaw in Epic, or if – hopefully not when – Judy decides to slow speeds to restrict capabilities. Healthcare would grind to a halt.
The Starlink slowdown might seem like just a problem with Starlink and just for Ukraine, but it’s not. When a single company and, indeed, a single person, has such control over the lives of so many people, with no alternatives and no recourse, that’s a problem for us all.
Kim is a former emarketing exec at a major Blues plan, editor of the late & lamented Tincture.io, and now regular THCB contributor
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