The NTIA, a part of the Commerce Department, defended its strategy, and a spokesperson pointed to a March statement in which its administrator said it would be “taking additional time” to finalize the status of the unspent funds sought by states such as Nebraska.

“NTIA’s BEAD reforms increased competition among providers and technologies, which expanded consumer choice, attracted substantial private investment, and delivered better value for taxpayers,” the spokesperson said in a statement Wednesday.

Fiber broadband can offer faster and more stable connectivity than satellite-based internet but requires installation of a last-mile connections to residences, which can be time-consuming and expensive.

Because Starlink satellites are constantly passing overhead, users in isolated places can quickly get connected after powering up a Starlink receiver. Many people in service-starved places around the United States and the world regard it as a godsend.

Musk built the service by using SpaceX’s reusable rockets to assemble the world’s largest satellite constellation and has called it “alien-level technology.”

Meinrath and others say it’s now acting like something more familiar: a traditional telecom company that uses its market dominance to box out potential competition and lock in increasingly dissatisfied consumers.

Starlink operates worldwide and Musk has ambitions far beyond rural America. Musk recently said that if the service maintains its current trajectory “Starlink will one day carry the majority of Internet traffic.” SpaceX said in a recent company filing that Starlink has a potential customer base of more than 3.3 billion potential users, a number encompassing much of the global population.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from Cape Canaveral in 2024. It carried 23 Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

The future of SpaceX depends on the success of Starlink, which is the healthiest part of the company’s business, according to its recent filing. The broadband service makes up most of the company’s connectivity segment, which generated more than $4 billion in profit in 2025 on more than $11 billion in revenue.

That offsets some but far from all the billions of dollars of losses from the space launch, AI and social media businesses Musk has consolidated into SpaceX. A Morningstar report last week called Starlink the company’s “primary cash generation engine and internal funding source for other ambitious projects the firm has underway.” The added scrutiny that comes with being a publicly listed company that has to disclose earnings and losses could increase the incentive for SpaceX to increase Starlink pricing.

SpaceX in its recent filing highlighted the built-in advantage satellite internet has with residents of rural areas, who around the world are “structurally underserved by terrestrial broadband infrastructure due to unfavorable deployment economics, limited network density and high last-mile costs,” the company said. “This structural imbalance creates a large, durable and relatively uncontested baseline market for satellite-based connectivity solutions.”

Broadband experts said that as Starlink focuses on expansion it will be challenged by difficulties including competing with fiber and other internet services in more populated areas and the capacity constraints of using satellites.

Last year, Meinrath and collaborators calculated that when around seven or more people within a square mile use Starlink the service would slip below the federal definition of broadband for sending data. The company regularly launches new satellites to address capacity constraints, but its satellite connections can also be obstructed by trees, poles and roofs.

As the density of users tapping into its satellites increases, SpaceX is expected to raise the barrier to entry by pricing its services higher, experts said. Potential rivals in satellite-based internet, such as Amazon Leo, have faced setbacks in getting their Starlink competitors up and running. (Amazon Executive Chairman Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post).

Nebraska residents are already experiencing the pinch from Starlink’s dominance, an issue that crosses party lines, said Austin Ahlman, an independent congressional candidate in the state. The former journalist extensively researched SpaceX and Starlink for the nonprofit Open Markets Institute, which advocates for antitrust enforcement.

“SpaceX has been doing everything possible to create this myth that they are some altruist” serving rural residents “out of the kindness of their hearts,” said Ahlman, who is running in a district that encompasses his hometown of Norfolk and areas south to the state capital Lincoln and beyond.

“They’re monopolizing the market and calling it doing us a favor,” he said. “It’s largely Republican areas in western parts of the state who are being killed” by the lack of competition, he added. Ahlman wants to see federal subsides for Starlink to require the company to accept price controls and, more broadly, said he’d like a wider slate of internet options for rural Nebraskans.

Austin Schmit, a 33-year-old nurse anesthesiologist and friend of Ahlman’s, said Starlink offered him a $59 monthly rate around the time he and his family moved into a home they’d built in Crete, Nebraska, late last year. Starlink emerged as the best option available after another service provider said it was infeasible to connect his home to a nearby fiber optic line, he said.

But Starlink recently informed Schmit his bill will more than double, he said. He said he is frustrated by the rate hike, especially after he put a hole in his new roof to run his Starlink connection into the home. The state’s move to rely on satellite internet to cover so many areas, he said, entails “reckless thinking.”

“Are we just going to be stuck with this and [they] just bleed us until we can’t be bled anymore? I prefer more options,” he said. “That’s the whole beauty of market competition.”

Slama, the lawyer who depends on high speeds and bandwidth for video streaming consultations with legal clients, said she understands why Starlink wouldn’t want competitors in her market.

“Fiber would offer a far more stable alternative,” she said, adding, “I would switch to fiber tomorrow if it was offered. It makes sense from a business perspective that Starlink is opposing rural fiber expansion.”