{"id":16366,"date":"2026-10-28T06:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-10-28T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/?p=16366"},"modified":"2026-10-28T06:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-10-28T06:00:00","slug":"id-like-some-choices-please","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/?p=16366","title":{"rendered":"I\u2019d Like Some Choices, Please"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n<\/div>\n

By KIM BELLARD<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s 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 \u2013 whoops \u2013 that\u2019s owned by Mark Zuckerberg, another of the super-rich who have turned to the right. There\u2019s always Facebook but \u2013 damn! \u2013 Zucked again! So you migrate to Bluesky, where the discourse is more civil but the audiences admittedly smaller. At least you have some choices.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

President Zelensky raised the alarm<\/a>. Secretary of State Rubio said he thought software \u201cglitches\u201d were to blame, but most people suspected either Starlink\u2019s 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<\/a> he\u2019d ordered the slowdown, saying Ukraine had violated the \u201cterms of service\u201d of the service, using it \u201cfor offensive drone strikes to kill people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Note that Serhii Beskrestnov, a Ukrainian presidential adviser on military technology, wrote on social media<\/a> \u201cwe are PHYSICALLY UNABLE TO USE COMMERCIAL STARLINK for deep strikes or medium-range strikes.\u201d<\/p>\n

The \u201cloophole was closed last week,\u201d according to both Mr. Musk and President Zelensky, with normal speeds resumed, but if you were President Zelensky you\u2019d sure have to be looking for alternatives, as you\u2019d never know when the equally mercurial Mr. Musk or President Trump might pull another Lucy on you (Gen Z: check your \u201cPeanuts\u201d references).<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, there really aren\u2019t any, and that\u2019s a problem.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

One might expect that another one of the newly MAGA super-rich who is into space \u2013 e.g., Jeff Bezos \u2013 might have filled this space (pun intended), and you\u2019d be partly right. Amazon has been working on Project Kuiper \u2013 now Project Leo<\/a> \u2013 for years now, and now his space company Blue Origin has launched TeraWave,<\/a> offering \u201cspace-based communications.\u201d Unfortunately, despite all his and Amazon\u2019s money, neither is ready for primetime; Leo has fewer than two hundred satellites in orbit, and TeraWave won\u2019t even launch until late 2027. So President Zelensky better be looking elsewhere.<\/p>\n

Accordingly, Ukraine\u2019s Ministry of Defense signed a letter of intent<\/a> with Finnish companies Nokia and ICEYE \u201cto develop new defense and satellite communication capabilities.\u201d President Zelensky acknowledged<\/a>: \u201cModern warfare has proven that reliable communications are a matter of national security. We must all rely on capabilities that we can control.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rafal Modrzewski, CEO and Co-founder of ICEYE, agrees: \u201cUkraine 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

President Zelensky has also met<\/a> with leaders in Norway to develop new satellite communications capabilities, along with air defense systems. And he told reporters<\/a> Ukraine has its own plans: \u201cThere are developments. We are working on the same [similar to] Starlink.\u201d 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<\/em><\/a>: \u201cCapital isn\u2019t the constraint any more. Launch is.\u201d<\/p>\n

European leaders are watching the U.S. turn its back on allies with alarm, and it is no surprise that they realize they can\u2019t be dependent on Starlink either. The European Union already has Govsatcom<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

Merien ten Houten writes in Innovation Origins<\/em><\/a> that Europe is working on at least three alternatives to it: the IRIS\u00b2 project<\/a>, its own secure satellite network; Project Bromo<\/a>, 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, Telef\u00f3nica and Vodafone to create a satellite-based network for mobile phones.<\/p>\n

Obviously, none of these are anywhere near being ready to help Ukraine, or anyone else. IRIS\u00b2 is furthest along, and it won\u2019t launch until at least 2029.<\/p>\n

Canada has its own concerns about dependencies on U.S. capabilities, and so it has awarded<\/a> Toronto-based Telesat a contract to \u201cstrengthen secure and reliable military communications.\u201d 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<\/em><\/a> that, although its primary customer is the Canadian Armed Forces, it expects to offer its services to NATO and other partners, including Ukraine.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

I have to confess, I don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

Similarly, if Russia were to invade Netherlands, or China Taiwan, taking over, respectively, ASML and TSMC, the rest of the world\u2019s chip-making abilities would fall back to the 20th century.<\/p>\n

And, gosh, last week we discovered that an AI-discovered flaw<\/a> in a programming language most of us had never heard of \u2013 PHP \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

If you work in healthcare, think about what will happen when \u2013 not if \u2013 AI discovers a critical security flaw in Epic, or if \u2013 hopefully not when \u2013 Judy decides to slow speeds to restrict capabilities. Healthcare would grind to a halt.<\/p>\n

The Starlink slowdown might seem like just a problem with Starlink and just for Ukraine, but it\u2019s 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\u2019s a problem for us all.<\/p>\n

Kim is a former emarketing exec at a major Blues plan, editor of the late & lamented\u00a0<\/em>Tincture.io<\/em><\/a>, and now regular THCB contributor<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By KIM BELLARD Let\u2019s 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 \u2013 whoops \u2013 that\u2019s owned by Mark Zuckerberg, another of the super-rich who have turned to the right. There\u2019s always Facebook…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":16365,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16366","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16366"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16366"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16366\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/16365"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}