"The real loser here is rural America. We're now planning on spending billions and billions of dollars to try to get high-speed internet service to those same, or some of those same, locations – we're doing it spending dollars on the penny."
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Commissioner Brendan Carr says Elon Musk and his Starlink internet service were denied a contract from the FCC because of “partisan politics.” The Biden-Harris administration agency has also forced broadcasters to report the race and gender of their employees.
"Lawfare," Musk said.
"You have an agency that in 2023 says that Starlink is not reasonably capable of providing high-speed internet. And then in 2024, they're saying it's so capable of providing high-speed internet that we're going to toss the word monopoly out there. There's just no way to sort of, I don't think, square what's going on here with a fair application of the law or the facts, it just looks like partisan politics in my view," FCC Commissioner Carr told Fox Business.
"I've got no problem with anyone saying we need more competition, I'm for more competition. But I think it crosses the line when you just casually float the word monopoly out there," Carr said. "Was it said that they are a monopoly? No, but the word monopoly was used in the same speech as saying we need more competition with Starlink."
Just four years ago, Starlink was included in an FCC program that gave grants to companies who could assist in the development of high-speed internet across the United States and particularly in rural areas. Starlink was provided with an $885 million grant to connect over 640,000 homes and businesses. The FCC revoked that contract in 2022 and confirmed it in December 2023, Fox Business reported.
FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel argued that the "FCC followed a careful legal, technical and policy review to determine that this applicant had failed to meet its burden to be entitled to nearly $900 million" in funding. But Rosenworcel is now apparently worried about satellite internet services and monopolies, claiming that Starlink has "almost two-thirds of the satellites that are in space right now and has a very high portion of internet traffic… Our economy doesn't benefit from monopolies. So we've got to invite many more space actors in, many more companies that can," according to Fox Business.
Carr said that he and other Republican appointees at the FCC dissented from the FCC's reversal of Starlink's grant and said that decision had to be assessed in light of President Joe Biden saying in November 2022 that SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk's relationships with other countries were "worthy of being looked at."
"The real loser here is rural America," Carr told Fox Business. "We're now planning on spending billions and billions of dollars to try to get high-speed internet service to those same, or some of those same, locations – we're doing it spending dollars on the penny."
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