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I’d bet a year’s salary that somewhere along the line, eel-on-musk made some promises to a bunch of politicians in 15 states, contingent on making Starlink the only way for poor people to access the internet. He’s literally building his monopoly in the open, as we speak.
I’ll additionally bet that it will be a blatantly non-net-neutral service, with certain ideological sectors/services paywalled or simply excluded altogether - e.g. Truth, Newsmax, OANN, and Facebook included in the base package, Fox for a very small premium, anything to the left of that is a meaningfully pricey “add-on”, and fledgling/competitor/open/ FOSS services and protocols like Bluesky and the fediverse fully blocked.
This is the beginning of a play to fully control the domestic information diet, particularly for less wealthy people.
I’m sure this won’t have implications that are even worse than when he took over Twitter and used it to help the fascists win.
Edit: yes, I’m aware I’m blurring the definition between ideological filtering and “actual” net neutrality, but honestly, this is roughly how I believe it’ll play out, because if you control the uplink, you can show or block the user from whatever the fuck you want, using whatever basis you want. It doesn’t necessarily have to just be a paywall. It’s just that I haven’t seen any non-net-neutral ISPs actually try to do something that blatantly censorious and biased in concert with a government before (the CCP’s GFW doesn’t really apply here). Remember: this is Musk and Trump we’re talking about. They want money and control. That’s their goal. If they can get both at once, they’ll sure as shit go for it.
Net Neutrality doesn’t refer to blocking sites based on viewpoint. It refers to throttling data based on origin/destination - e.g. AT&T can’t cap you at 5GB but allow unlimited traffic to their Max streaming service. They also can’t double-dip and charge you for bandwidth to stream Netflix and also Netflix to get access to you.
I know it’s not referring to blocking particular ideologies.
But it can effectively mean throttling or blocking based on ideology, if the origin of the content is on a site that the people doing the filtering don’t like the ideology, and they’ve packaged things such that there’s a more of a paywall for sites the Powers That Be aren’t too keen on. What I’m getting at is this looks a lot like they’re trying to lock in the majority of poorer Americans and force them to consume only their propaganda, because it’s all Starlink will show them.
And I wouldn’t be terribly shocked if Comcast et al ends up following suit, in the interest of appeasing Trump and maybe getting him to give them more tax breaks, because that’s precisely how our government works now.
https://landfamilyhome.substack.com/p/a-household-guide-for-cyber-defense
https://landfamilyhome.substack.com/p/presidents-day-update-a-household