Last week, the world’s richest man told 1.4 billion Indians that they were victims of a crime. The culprits, Elon Musk announced on X, were “certain oligarchs” blocking Starlink to keep their grip on the Indian market. He named no one and offered no evidence, and he invited us to guess. The post was built to travel, and it did. With it, the entrepreneur slipped out of orbit and into ad hominem.
Begin with what India has actually built. A phone call here costs about three paise a minute, and a gigabyte of data roughly nine rupees, among the lowest prices anywhere on earth. More than a billion Indians carry a mobile connection, and the average Indian smartphone consumes some 32 gigabytes a month against a global average of 19. An American pays many times more for the same gigabyte. Affordable voice and data for 1.4 billion people is the India story, written through fierce competition, public digital infrastructure and patient policy.
If Mr Musk is searching for a connectivity crime, he might begin at home. Starlink faces no oligarchs in America and has operated freely there for years. Yet residents of upstate New York have reported more than four thousand dead zones, and the story repeats from the hollows of Appalachia to the ranchlands of the Great Plains. Washington’s own map still counts more than fourteen million American homes and businesses without 5G. When the regulator drive-tested rural networks, it found maps that oversold coverage, promising signal where there was none. Perhaps that is what happens when the powerful write the rules in Washington and answer to no one. Perhaps Starlink, and its founder, might connect America first before lecturing India on its villages.
Even on its own terms, his charge against India does not survive contact with the facts. The decisive policy fight in Indian satellite communications was over how spectrum should be allocated. India settled it in Starlink’s favour, choosing administrative allocation over an auction despite fierce objections from the incumbent telecom operators. If oligarchs were writing the rules, they wrote them remarkably badly.
One might also ask who the oligarch in this story really is. The richest man in history owns the rockets, the satellites, the social network on which he levelled the charge, and a direct line to the White House. If anyone holds a monopolistic chokehold on a conversation, it is the man who owns the platform and the orbit. When the world’s richest man complains about oligarchs on a platform he owns, the mirror may be the better place to look.
What remains between Starlink and Indian customers is a security review, which the Ministry of Communications says applies equally to all three prospective operators. Each must meet the same conditions before it can seek spectrum. That review deserves a serious defence. Satellite internet bypasses the terrestrial chokepoints that make lawful oversight possible. A terminal in a remote valley is a lifeline. The same terminal in an insurgent camp is a problem for the state.
Infrastructure that carries a nation’s data, finance and emergency communications is strategic infrastructure. We would not hand over a port, a power grid or a strategic petroleum reserve on the strength of a social media post. Orbital networks deserve the same care.
There is a larger pattern worth naming. A small number of technology owners now command networks, orbits and audiences larger than most nations. Increasingly, they treat national law as an opening bid, and their own platforms as a lever on governments. Musk’s X has already gone to court against the Indian government over content rules. The Starlink post belongs to the same playbook: frame due process as a conspiracy, cast the regulator as the villain, and let the crowd do the lobbying.
I warned some years ago that runaway platforms and cowboy capitalism would become the defining governance challenge of the digital age. The argument then was that intermediary liability must give way to intermediary responsibility. Platforms that shape the public life of a nation have to answer to that nation’s laws and constitutional ethic. Orbital internet raises the stakes further, because the infrastructure literally sits above the reach of national borders.
The episode matters well beyond India. Starlink has just launched a direct-to-mobile service in Bangladesh, and the UAE granted it a ten-year licence in August. Across the Global South, governments will negotiate the terms on which orbital networks enter their skies. India’s approach offers a template worth sharing: welcome the capability, insist on accountability, and apply the same rules to the foreign giant and the domestic champion. A technology must answer to the geography it serves.
India has managed far heavier pressure than a viral post. It spent four decades building a self-reliant nuclear programme under sanctions, and it built the world’s most widely used public digital infrastructure without asking anyone’s permission. It will connect its last village on its own terms, with partners who accept that a republic’s rules are its foundation.
Starlink is welcome in India. Its founder’s impatience is his own affair. President Musk may own the White House dinner table, and he may be the most favoured oligarch of the Western Hemisphere, yet his place at that table comes with no free pass to every capital on earth. Some nations are still sovereign. The sky above India may be open, but the rules beneath it are written in New Delhi.
Courtesy: MoneyControl
