Ontario Premier Doug Ford Wisely Rips Up Contract With Starlink He Never Should Have Signed In The First Place
After some initial waffling, Ontario Premier Doug Ford has finally shredded his Province’s $100 million contract with Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite broadband service. Like many politicians (and shitty c-tier comedians turned podcasters), Ford was apparently tricked into thinking that the expensive, capacity-constrained broadband service was a sort of magic bullet for rural broadband access.
But with King Trump’s mindless and destructive tariffs on Canadian goods wreaking havoc, Ford appears to have come to his senses and finally scrapped the deal:
“This is not the outcome anyone wanted,” Ford said at Queen’s Park in Toronto. “We could have poured our efforts into making Canada and the U.S. the two richest, most successful, safest, most secure two countries on the planet. Unfortunately, one man — President Trump — has chosen chaos instead.”
Trump, of course, has no idea how anything actually works. He implemented his tariffs because it’s the kind of ignorant mafia-style bullying he’s used to from his years in NYC real estate fraud. Use whatever leverage you can find to threaten immense harm to your exploitation target, then giggle as they sheepishly approach you, hat in hand, eager to meet your ever-shifting and often incoherent demands (see: U.S. media companies) because you’re so clever, powerful, and masculine.
Canadians, quite correctly, have instead responded by telling King Dingus to go fuck himself.
But the fact is, Ford, or any political leader, shouldn’t be viewing Starlink as a “catch all” solution for rural broadband in the first place.
Starlink has been criticized for harming astronomical research and the ozone layer. Starlink customer service is largely nonexistent. Starlink is too expensive for the folks most in need of reliable broadband access. The nature of satellite physics and capacity means slowdowns and annoying restrictions are inevitable, and making it scale to meet real-world demand is many years away, if it happens ever.
There’s a growing waitlist for service, there’s no guarantee enough satellites remain in orbit to evenly deliver access and ever meet real-world demand, and oh, the CEO is a conspiratorial fascist with a head full of mashed potatoes and racism.
But “I didn’t do the reading” people (like Joe Rogan, Ford, and most of the GOP) genuinely view Starlink as some kind of magic. They think you can just sprinkle it all over rural counties, states, and provinces and declare mission accomplished. It hurts their head to think too deeply beyond that, so they don’t.
As a result, they’ve been busy redirecting taxpayer money away from more reliable options (like open access fiber, fixed wireless, or cellular 5G) and toward Elon Musk. A number of U.S. states have started to pretend that Starlink is a quick band aid for rural connectivity woes, and Trump loyalists are preparing to redirect much of the looming $42.5 billion in infrastructure bill broadband grants to Musk.
Again, that means money that won’t be going to small local ISPs staffed by people who live in and care about the communities they serve. It means redirecting money away from extremely popular, local community owned open access fiber networks that not only provide dirt cheap fiber, but also help lower the bar for entry among competitors.
It means wasting money to make Elon Musk happy. Under the pretense that it’s more efficient.
As the Wall Street Journal notes, the GOP is hard at work on this plan to funnel as much taxpayer money as possible to Starlink and away from small local businesses. Folks drunk on the idea of Starlink as some kind of miraculous band aid will inevitably be disappointed, and should be reminded of the system’s limitations whenever and wherever possible (perhaps by you at your next dinner conversation).
It’s also important to walk the talk. Reuters notes that numerous Canadian provinces still have active Starlink contracts that need to be re-examined. If you’re going to do this, you might as well do it correctly.