Comment by 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.
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.
> 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.