‘FRAIDY BEAR: Why Russia Is Terrified of SpaceX — and Starlink.

What does Russia have against cheap, fast, reliable internet from space? For one thing, Russian security services object that internet operated by a foreign satellite network would be immune from surveillance under Russia’s System of Operational Search Measures legislation (“SORM”). For another, they suspect that Starlink is part of a U.S. government plot to deploy “predatory, clever, powerful, high-technology … shock and awe … to advance, above all, [American] military interests.”

Yes, seriously.

And yet, there also seems to be an economic motivation to this ban on Starlink and other satellite networks. As Ars points out, “Russia is planning its own satellite Internet constellation, known as ‘Sphere.'” And in contrast to SpaceX’s Starlink, which is a privately funded and privately built communications system, the 600-satellite Sphere constellation will be a project built and run by the Russian state under the aegis of its Roscosmos space agency. And that could be a problem.

Sphere, you see, is rumored to cost $20 billion to build, may not begin launching until 2024, and won’t be completed before 2030. Given the amount of investment required, Russia’s government certainly doesn’t want to pay for the Sphere project only to discover three years from now that all of Sphere’s potential customers have already signed up for Starlink — and that it will never recover its investment.

It seems more likely that Moscow (and Beijing, too) is worried that Starlink users will be able to circumvent state censorship.

Like Glenn, Melissa and I signed up for Starlink last week, and hope they live up to their promise to have it available in the second half of the year. We’ll be trading some of Comcast’s top speeds that we don’t really need, in exchange for slightly lower prices, no data caps (yet?), and — best of all — no more subsidizing Comcast’s basic cable channels they require us to pay for.