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Comment by nradov

3 hours ago

X and Starlink don't even remotely have a "firm grip" over the social media or Internet access markets. They have many active competitors.

18 comments

nradov

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skissane  1 hour ago

> X and Starlink don't even remotely have a "firm grip" over the social media or Internet access markets. They have many active competitors.

Starlink's market isn't "Internet access" in general. Anywhere you can get fibre, fibre will be faster and cheaper. For many use cases a cell tower works better too, if you are in its coverage area.

Starlink's market is "high bandwidth / low latency Internet access no matter where you are on Earth". And for that it is by far the market leader. Its closest competitors are way behind – second place Amazon's Kuiper has under 400 satellites in orbit, Starlink has over 11,000. So Starlink is over an order of magnitude in front.

  • nradov  33 minutes ago

    If you define a market narrowly enough then pretty much any company has a "firm grip" on some market. That doesn't mean much in terms of overall market dynamics or broader power. My local neighborhood taqueria has a firm grip on the burrito market for a radius of at least 3 miles.

    • skissane  12 minutes ago

      > My local neighborhood taqueria has a firm grip on the burrito market for a radius of at least 3 miles.

      This is a bit of a silly comparison though – the market of providing high-speed low latency Internet access (a highly general-purpose service) anywhere on the planet, versus the market of providing one particular type of food in a small localised area.

cjkaminski  2 hours ago

Ok. Show your work.

Which social network has larger reach than X? Which social network has stronger influence on humans who make policy decisions than X?

Which internet provider can deliver reliable access to remote regions than Starlink? Which internet provider has manipulated access in contested regions than Starlink?

Maybe you're right, maybe you're wrong. I don't know. What I do know is that your baseless assertions are meaningless to me. Show the facts and figures that support your claims. That's the only way to avoid being a garden-variety internet troll.

  • triceratops  1 hour ago

    How do you define "reach" and "influence"?

    Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube all have more users, more daily active users, more aggregate data transferred.

    • cjkaminski  1 hour ago

      Excellent question. My definition is admittedly qualitative. I spend a fair bit of time listening to commentary by people who are connected to policy decisions at the state and federal level (in the USA). An unusual amount of people admit to relying upon X as their barometer of public sentiment, despite their intellectual understanding that Elon Musk has his thumb on the scale. Most of them have admitted they understand the "water has been poisoned" but they also claim that all alternatives are inferior. This might not apply to YouTube as much as the others, but I haven't seen evidence that disproves this theory. I'm open to the possibility, for sure. This said, I believe that Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok have a profound affect on large swaths of the population. The evidence I observe suggests that X is doing more work among the people who can text someone who makes decisions. Curious to know more about your POV. What am I missing?

  • nradov  2 hours ago

    Those are silly questions entirely irrelevant to the point above.

    • cjkaminski  2 hours ago

      How so? Defend your position.

      (edit: I genuinely don't understand how your replies are anything other than ad hominem attacks. Your responses are about as effective as a toddler asking "why?" over and over and over again. Either deliver a substantive counter argument or stop replying.)

      (edit 2: I assume you are the one who downvoted this reply. That only adds to the factual evidence that you are struggling to defend your position via legitimate means. This isn't a personal attack. I hoped you would engage in legitimate discourse. Please do better in the future.)

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