Spectrum warehousing lets corporations control the price of the internet in the developing world

Companies like OneWeb and Elon Musk’s Starlink have been moving forward on ambitious plans to make internet available to every person on earth, which is a noble goal considering an estimated 4.3 billion people don’t have internet access. The problem is that there’s a natural incentive for a private satellite company to engage in “spectrum warehousing,” or highballing the amount of satellites it asks the government to allow it to shoot up. The company’s request may get approved on paper, but the companies may drag their feet sending up those satellites, or never send them up at all. Reserving the space then becomes a path to monopoly: If one company has permission to use a specific area, and a specific spectrum range, it prevents competition and ultimately allows companies to jack up the prices on the spectrum they control. This means companies with lots of resources have the potential to take advantage of people for whom internet access, an increasingly necessary resource in the developing world, is not a given.