Crow: Elon Musk having control to cut off Starlink to Ukraine is ‘beyond disturbing to me’
What bothers me most about this story isn't just the power Musk holds, but how quietly that power accumulated. A single private company, and really a single person, has become the backbone of a wartime ally's communications. That's not a normal arrangement, and Crow is right to put it on the record.
The timing matters too. Musk alluding to slowing access on Saturday, then services being restored, suggests decisions are being made on the fly, maybe in response to public pressure. I'd want to know what actually happened behind the scenes, whether there was a real threat of cutoff and what it would have taken to make it stick. Congress has been slow to reckon with how much of our strategic infrastructure now sits in private hands, and this is a pretty vivid example of why that's a problem. I don't think the answer is necessarily government ownership, but we should be having a serious conversation about safeguards and guarantees before the next crisis, not after.