I think the fixation should be less on the 'free to use' portion of GPS, and more on the fact that for many of us there's basically one satellite-based location system to which we have access, in the same way that there may only be one set of phone landlines in my neighborhood, and one municipal water supply. Phone service and water are not free to use, but we also didn't pay to build several competing overlapping systems.
I compare this to cell service, where multiple private networks covering the same area are built and maintained, and if you're on the wrong network, you might have worse coverage in a given neighborhood than your friend -- and you both have worse coverage than you would under a hypothetical network which was the union of both.
The original article was about a plethora of companies who had aspired to create their own constellations and are now seeing that actually that's really expensive. We're still going to end up with several competing ones. Would we be better off (i.e. pay less for connectivity from a constellation with more satellites and better coverage) if there was one larger one?
> for many of us there's basically one satellite-based location system to which we have access
This isn’t the case though. Most “GPS” (GNSS is the better acronym) chips these days support several.
American GPS, Russian GlONASS, European Galelio, and Chinese BeiDou all provide the same basic functionality, the first three are quite common in most chipsets (like the one in your phone)
> we also didn't pay to build several competing overlapping systems
I think you're missing the history of utilities but also most public granted monopolies: they did grow out of several competing businesses. In the case of electricity, water, subway systems, most of these institutions will trace back to a history of privatized providers competing to establish a market. These utilities having a monopoly from the jump in any new developments is only because we've inherited that history and know better. It's only in the aftermath of providers clashing to an annoying enough degree that granted monopolies get created.
What is seen is a generally workable GNSS solution, especially after the removal of selective availability (note: this is a good thing, but by no means necessary; BeiDou still suffers from intentional degradation).
What is not seen is a potentially better service that doesn't cost $1 billion a year which wasn't created. GPS radios are fairly power hungry, slow to sync without ephemeris, and accuracy can vary especially near buildings and terrain. But it works well enough and is entrenched enough that a private improvement would struggle to make financial sense.
A utility of this scale also creates a single point of failure, which came to bear during the Galileo outage a few years ago. What some call needless competition is seen by others as redundancy & robustness. The water provider in Flint, MI should have gone out of business and been replaced for pumping lead into peoples' homes, but instead the situation became a political football. The only cost to bad actors was the expenditure of political capital; all but one minor charge was dropped.
There are lots of trade offs, so the ways we'd be better off change depending on the way the system is defined. I do think the consideration of what might have been is interesting nonetheless.
I think the fixation should be less on the 'free to use' portion of GPS, and more on the fact that for many of us there's basically one satellite-based location system to which we have access, in the same way that there may only be one set of phone landlines in my neighborhood, and one municipal water supply. Phone service and water are not free to use, but we also didn't pay to build several competing overlapping systems.
I compare this to cell service, where multiple private networks covering the same area are built and maintained, and if you're on the wrong network, you might have worse coverage in a given neighborhood than your friend -- and you both have worse coverage than you would under a hypothetical network which was the union of both.
The original article was about a plethora of companies who had aspired to create their own constellations and are now seeing that actually that's really expensive. We're still going to end up with several competing ones. Would we be better off (i.e. pay less for connectivity from a constellation with more satellites and better coverage) if there was one larger one?