Elon Musk Is Charging Starlink Customers Gigantic Bogus Fees Because Its Network Is Being Crushed by “High Demand”

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk maintains an extremely close relationship with Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr. Under Chairman Carr’s leadership, Musk’s rocket company has effectively been given carte blanche in its efforts to roll out its orbital Starlink broadband service to more Americans, a glaring conflict of interest that could have profound implications for society. That’s despite concerns over thousands or even millions of satellites cluttering our planet’s already extremely busy orbit and the environmentally damaging rocket launches that send them up. And the space-based network is already starting to experience some major strains — as some experts have long predicted. It’s a lesson some Starlink customers are finding out the hard way. SpaceX is now charging some users so-called “demand surcharges” of up to $1,500, simply because their address is within a high-demand area. “Starlink is too congested to handle meaningful load at scale so they’re quietly hitting people with $750-$1500 ‘demand surcharges,'” TechDirt‘s Karl Bode wrote in a recent post on Bluesky. Even worse, those who are trying to contest these charges are facing a “black hole,” since SpaceX doesn’t “invest in customer service.” The development highlights some considerable shortcomings that satellite-based internet has over physical broadband infrastructure back on the ground, including fiber.