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This has a "Bitcoin will solve finance" feel to it. Not to be super dismissive, but there's just as much likelihood it will help as it won't. But in your corne

This has a "Bitcoin will solve finance" feel to it. Not to be super dismissive, but there's just as much likelihood it will help as it won't. But in your corner: It's true that right now space-based deployment of broadband will provide broadband in locations where it's not currently available - perhaps spurring competition. It's also probably true that space-based broadband will be able to compete directly with urban / dense areas where Comcast & company have an effective monopoly - also a good thing! But there's no reason to think it will put comcast/company out of business at all. Has cell-tower based intenet service at all displaced comcast? Verizon and T-Mobile canvas my neighborhood claiming to offer the best internet, but as far as I can tell, everyone still uses Xfinity, even if Centurylink is much, much better.

sabbaticaldev 2y ago
TV made radio irrelevant, the internet made TV irrelevant. Both still exists but as money-losing mass manipulation tools
- jvanderbot 2y ago
  But those are new kinds. Not new providers. There's no phone company that made all other phone companies irrelevant. There's no tv channel that made all other tv channels irrelevant. And there's no radio station that .. you get it. And so it's hard for me to concolude that there's some ISP that will make all other ISPs irrelevant. Honestly most people will probably have about a 50/50 split between home wifi and phone internet. And that home wifi might have significant intrusion from space-based ISP, but not completely. (I realize spacex is also hoping to provide some phone service from satellites, but I digress)
- badgersnake 2y ago
  TV certainly didn't make radio irrelevant, radio is very relevant in situations where you can't look at a screen, or would prefer not to. It's also much lower bandwidth, takes up a lot less space, uses a lot less power on the receiver (even compared to say a modern mobile device) and audio only content is much cheaper to produce. I've heard it argued that podcasts make radio obsolete. That is more plausible.
- cogman10 2y ago
  How will Internet access make Internet access irrelevant? This is much like saying satellite TV made cable TV irrelevant. Or magazines made newspapers irrelevant.
- HPsquared 2y ago
  TV was always an advertising platform first and foremost. In other words a money-losing mass manipulation tool.
  - salawat 2y ago
    Believe it or not, Farnsworth, (inventor of the principles making Television possible) had no intention of it being used as an advertising or propaganda tool when setting out to figure out the problem. That's very much a "what people decided to do with it" thing. Bored farmer figures out thing, industry does horrible things with it is a tale as old as time. It was supposed to be for recording and playing back images. That was pretty much it. His original aspiration was for it to be employed in educational contexts to help make tge spread of visual information possible. Now if you're talking TV Broadcasting as an industry, then you're absolutely correct. That was the business model settled on, but not without some foundational hmmm'ing, haww'ing and experimentation in coming up with business models in the radio broadcasting space. The history is in itself an interesting piece of work to dive into.
EGreg 2y ago
Genuinely wondering, why are so many people on HN allergic to any mention of decentralized solutions? It was precisely the opposite in 2014. Now, anything that smells of BFT consensus, open decentralized protocols, smart contracts, distributed computing, gets lumped with “Web3” and downvoted to oblivion. I was surprised Freenet got through the other day without being associated with it, despite having WASM smart contracts and all of it. Shouldn’t “hackers” welcome building new, disruptive things, especially if they are open source and disrupt entrenched centralized solutions of the entseeking “establishment” cartels? I feel like an old grandpa on HN today, still embracing the “old” “Hacker Ethos” that was being promoted by YC when HN was in its early days. Has hacker ethos really today shifted to unironically supporting closed, centralized solutions, and attacking most disruptive technology by deriding it, downvoting people who speak about it in any terms other than dismissive, and trying to make sure it doesn’t take off? It feels a bit like the story of the political left and liberalism — once upon a time the goal of liberals was to make race a non-issue, for instance, but now that same attitude is considered racist by many on the left. Once hackers were anti-establishment in an “information wants to be free” way. To liberate “systems” from “the man” and bust them open. I remember it. It was still the case a mere 10-15 years ago. On today’s “Hacker” News, if you’d look across a large swath of reactions to projects which aim to do just that, you’d never know it…
- tialaramex 2y ago
  Where are you seeing a "decentralized solution"?
  - EGreg 2y ago
    “Communities getting together and making their own broadband”? Big Telco Cartels using Big Government to shut it down? Why is this bad: https://qbix.com/blog/2017/12/18/power-to-the-people/ https://qbix.com/blog/2017/12/18/power-to-the-people/
    - tialaramex 2y ago
      Oh! Yes, “Communities getting together and making their own broadband” does sound like a decentralized approach and I agree that it's worth doing and certainly shouldn't be outlawed. I didn't see allergic reactions to that - but maybe I didn't look enough yet. This sub-thread seems to be about using StarLink, which I don't see as any sort of "decentralized" given it is literally global and in effect controlled by one billionaire so hence my question.

sabbaticaldev 2y ago

TV made radio irrelevant, the internet made TV irrelevant. Both still exists but as money-losing mass manipulation tools

jvanderbot 2y ago
But those are new kinds. Not new providers. There's no phone company that made all other phone companies irrelevant. There's no tv channel that made all other tv channels irrelevant. And there's no radio station that .. you get it. And so it's hard for me to concolude that there's some ISP that will make all other ISPs irrelevant. Honestly most people will probably have about a 50/50 split between home wifi and phone internet. And that home wifi might have significant intrusion from space-based ISP, but not completely. (I realize spacex is also hoping to provide some phone service from satellites, but I digress)
badgersnake 2y ago
TV certainly didn't make radio irrelevant, radio is very relevant in situations where you can't look at a screen, or would prefer not to. It's also much lower bandwidth, takes up a lot less space, uses a lot less power on the receiver (even compared to say a modern mobile device) and audio only content is much cheaper to produce. I've heard it argued that podcasts make radio obsolete. That is more plausible.
cogman10 2y ago
How will Internet access make Internet access irrelevant? This is much like saying satellite TV made cable TV irrelevant. Or magazines made newspapers irrelevant.
HPsquared 2y ago
TV was always an advertising platform first and foremost. In other words a money-losing mass manipulation tool.
- salawat 2y ago
  Believe it or not, Farnsworth, (inventor of the principles making Television possible) had no intention of it being used as an advertising or propaganda tool when setting out to figure out the problem. That's very much a "what people decided to do with it" thing. Bored farmer figures out thing, industry does horrible things with it is a tale as old as time. It was supposed to be for recording and playing back images. That was pretty much it. His original aspiration was for it to be employed in educational contexts to help make tge spread of visual information possible. Now if you're talking TV Broadcasting as an industry, then you're absolutely correct. That was the business model settled on, but not without some foundational hmmm'ing, haww'ing and experimentation in coming up with business models in the radio broadcasting space. The history is in itself an interesting piece of work to dive into.

EGreg 2y ago

Genuinely wondering, why are so many people on HN allergic to any mention of decentralized solutions? It was precisely the opposite in 2014. Now, anything that smells of BFT consensus, open decentralized protocols, smart contracts, distributed computing, gets lumped with “Web3” and downvoted to oblivion. I was surprised Freenet got through the other day without being associated with it, despite having WASM smart contracts and all of it. Shouldn’t “hackers” welcome building new, disruptive things, especially if they are open source and disrupt entrenched centralized solutions of the entseeking “establishment” cartels? I feel like an old grandpa on HN today, still embracing the “old” “Hacker Ethos” that was being promoted by YC when HN was in its early days. Has hacker ethos really today shifted to unironically supporting closed, centralized solutions, and attacking most disruptive technology by deriding it, downvoting people who speak about it in any terms other than dismissive, and trying to make sure it doesn’t take off? It feels a bit like the story of the political left and liberalism — once upon a time the goal of liberals was to make race a non-issue, for instance, but now that same attitude is considered racist by many on the left. Once hackers were anti-establishment in an “information wants to be free” way. To liberate “systems” from “the man” and bust them open. I remember it. It was still the case a mere 10-15 years ago. On today’s “Hacker” News, if you’d look across a large swath of reactions to projects which aim to do just that, you’d never know it…

tialaramex 2y ago
Where are you seeing a "decentralized solution"?
- EGreg 2y ago
  “Communities getting together and making their own broadband”? Big Telco Cartels using Big Government to shut it down? Why is this bad: https://qbix.com/blog/2017/12/18/power-to-the-people/ https://qbix.com/blog/2017/12/18/power-to-the-people/
  - tialaramex 2y ago
    Oh! Yes, “Communities getting together and making their own broadband” does sound like a decentralized approach and I agree that it's worth doing and certainly shouldn't be outlawed. I didn't see allergic reactions to that - but maybe I didn't look enough yet. This sub-thread seems to be about using StarLink, which I don't see as any sort of "decentralized" given it is literally global and in effect controlled by one billionaire so hence my question.