The European Commission will adopt a decision this week that would privilege European satellite operators in a move designed to curb the European expansion of Starlink, the flagship service of Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Starlink currently dominates the global satellite internet market with over 10,000 low-orbit satellites. Its closest competitor is Amazon’s Project Kuiper, which recently launched its first commercial satellite constellation.
The strategic importance of satellite-based communications became clear after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, when Starlink provided a lifeline to Ukrainian troops after physical communications infrastructure was knocked out of service.
More recently, Ukraine reportedly regained about 400 square kilometres of territory in a counter-offensive earlier this year after managing to disable thousands of illicit Russian Starlink terminals.
Yet despite the systems' role in denying Russia major gains in Ukraine, Europeans have grown wary of the strategic dependence on US operators controlling such a critical communications system.
