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TulliusCicero | on: Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?
Generally speaking, private companies want to make money by getting customers. Obviously there can be edge cases, but if there's profit to be made by hooking people up, they'll want to do it, and if private companies don't want to get more customers, you have to ask yourself some hard questions about why.

I think we both know what's usually happening: people in an area who, as a whole, are rural enough and poor enough that the economics don't really pen out well. And I'm sure said corporations would be happy for the local government to pay the cost of running those lines out -- if that's not happening, ask yourself why those local governments don't want to pay for it either.

Now if you want to say, "well I don't care if it scales badly, the federal government should just subsidize it until it works", that's your prerogative. But another option would be to encourage zoning and similar rules that impact how people live to change towards better scaling of infrastructure and services, so that spending on these kinds of things is more sustainable and fair.

sysguest | parent
this

people here don't understand how large USA is -- connecting every corner with copper/fiber, with all the intermediary networking devices means tax money...

devin | root | parent | next
Yes, it does mean tax money. Stop corporate welfare and bump the corporate tax rate back to a reasonable value.
nradov | root | parent
A better option would be to eliminate corporate income tax entirely, and raise taxes on the highest income employees and investors to make the change revenue neutral. Corporations waste a lot of resources on financial engineering to minimize tax liability, and that's a pure deadweight loss for the economy as a whole.
Tempest1981 | root | parent
Savvy executives can also keep their income near 0 by borrowing against their stock holdings.
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heavyset_go | root | parent | next
We paid $900 million in taxes to subsidize rural access to Starlink in one year lol

We also paid $42 billion in taxes for ISPs to roll out broadband access in a 2021 bill, and it hasn't connected a single person to the internet

Before that, we paid $400 billion to ISPs to do the same thing with the same results

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hattmall | root | parent
Yes, but we've already done it, twice, and the benefits were quite significant.