The New Space Race

It’s more of a connectivity race.

I’m curious about the upcoming space race between Blue Origin, SpaceX, and other new players. Amazon’s push is to have global Internet coverage. It’s own network, anywhere in the world, it’ll own the pipe, the services, everything. Facebook has made similar moves outside of the US with it’s internet.org project. Or Google’s Project Loon.

We’re not looking at an open Internet over the new few decades. We’re looking at providers who are hosting their preferred content closer to the edge. To some extent, Net Neutrality has been eroding over time. You host your apps on AWS or Google Compute engine, they might end being reached faster by other apps on the service.

Can you pay to have your app running on the satellite that’s closest to those accessing it?

We’re going to be playing catch up with figuring out what’s fair play in global satellite Internet. Most of thought about this until now has been around governing the objects that orbit and the frequencies they broadcast at. We now have to think about the content that they send.

PS… Ironically, I’m writing this somewhere over the Atlantic, somewhere in between Iceland and Greenland, over a satellite connection. Ping is high but so is throughput.