Hate Your Internet Provider? Look to Space | WSJ

Also see Can Jeff Bezos Make Money in Space? | WSJ (News+ link)

"If you hate your internet provider, the good news is that in the next five to 10 years, you may have the opportunity to ditch it in favor of a system that transcends regional monopolies, requires no visits by the cable guy and follows you wherever you go. That’s because just over the horizon there will be constellations of satellites orbiting the Earth at high speed, providing fast satellite internet directly from space. The bad news is that you might just be trading one monopolist for another, since the companies that have embarked on the race to connect you to the internet through satellites include the ones that already comprise much of Big Tech: Facebook, Google and Amazon.
The reasons this is happening now are myriad, but it wouldn’t be happening as quickly if not for the whims of eccentric billionaires—notably Jeff Bezos through Amazon’s just-revealed subsidiary Project Kuiper, Elon Musk of SpaceX, and Richard Branson of Virgin Orbit—all of whom have plans to launch satellites to provide internet."

Hate Your Internet Provider? Look to Space | WSJ (News+ link)