One man bands

We worry a lot about powerful countries in the grip of one man rule, a one man who is apt to become old, dictatorial, capricious and generally useless without having made respectable arrangements for the succession. A problem which we here in England used to suffer from in the hey-day of the monarchy. Think King Lear. We worry a bit about countries on which we are overly dependant for supplies of something or other, perhaps oil or gas. We don’t mind such countries getting rich, but we do mind about their meddling in political matters – or exporting their religion – and we do want them to be reliable.

Then we have powerful corporations, perhaps bigger in terms of turnover than many countries, mostly devoted to making money for their owners. Perhaps an owner, perhaps a group of owners, perhaps lots of shareholders. Perhaps some tricky mixture involving golden shares and preference shares.

Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and the diversified Elon Musk fit the bill. Big rich cheeses in big rich corporations, largely of their own making. And it is Musk, the man who loves a good tweet, who is in the frame this morning.

I learn from references 1 and 2 that he has built a distributed Internet service based on thousands of low flying, mass produced satellites. A service that you can plug into with a small antenna and a box of tricks, perhaps looking something like the snap above. Plug and play. Just the thing if you live in a place poorly served terrestrially.

A service which is being used to keep all sorts of stuff – civil and military – going in the Ukraine where terrestrial services are indeed in poor shape. So, for the Ukraine at least, critical national infrastructure. But do we want such infrastructure to be in the hands of someone like Musk? A someone who might also be making a lot of money out of providing some service or other to Russia and who might be loath to prejudice that slice of his income. Whichever way he jumps, he is meddling in political matters. A bind which Facebook has got into with bad content. When to censor and when to let it roll?

With the push that all these satellites give to the militarisation of space being another worry.

The old, lefty answer used to be that such services should be run by the state for the people. You don’t let corporations take them over in the name of profits for the few. Sadly, the answer is no longer that simple, even supposing that it ever was.

References

Reference 1: Ukraine’s Starlink problems show the dangers of digital dependency: Musk’s technology raises questions about the extent to which a capricious billionaire should be involved in defence - Gillian Tett, Financial Times – 2022.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink.

Reference 3: https://www.starlink.com/.