The High-Stakes Battle for Invisible Real Estate in Space

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is working to grab invisible real estate: the radio spectrum that carries wireless signals. Its competitors are doing the same. That has set off a race that resembles the land rushes of the 19th century, except in the air.

Radio spectrum cannot be legally owned. But as it has become more valuable, companies and governments have been jostling to control more of it. On Earth, competitors have heavily invested in staking out the rights to use broader swaths of airwaves. And in space, China and other countries have suggested they may want more say over who uses which spectrum to communicate with Earth.

In the United States, licenses to use specific spectrum bands serve as pseudo property rights. The Federal Communications Commission allows them to be bought, sold and leased (with its approval), and it renews them almost automatically, absent misconduct. The industry trade group USTelecom told a federal court the industry sank more than $230 billion into F.C.C. auctions as well as $700 billion into networks on the assumption it was buying something close to property.

Shares of phone and cable companies have been under pressure in recent months over fears that SpaceX will scoop up more spectrum at an auction next year and use it to compete with them, including by connecting ordinary cellphones directly to satellites.

There is also a race to acquire spectrum used for communications with outer space, where satellite frequencies are managed by the International Telecommunication Union, a branch of the United Nations.

The federal government applies for these licenses on behalf of American companies under a first-come-first-served system. Later entrants can use the same airwaves, but must coordinate with the incumbent to avoid interfering with it. That system has worked well for SpaceX and other American companies that filed early and in bulk.

Much of the rest of the world isn’t thrilled with that status quo, seeing the airwaves less as a piece of property and more as a resource to be shared by all under international oversight. That may seem high-minded, but it’s also a defensive move against powerful first movers such as SpaceX.

American negotiators are gearing up for a fight at the World Radiocommunication Conference, which will be held in October and November 2027 in Shanghai — home turf of the powerful Chinese delegation. Late-coming Chinese companies have flooded the I.T.U. with applications for satellite frequencies, while insisting on “equitable access” to bands where earlier filings, mostly by American operators, already hold priority.

SpaceX pinpointed the problem in the risk factors section of the prospectus for its initial public offering, which valued the company at $1.8 trillion. Getting spectrum licenses “can be a complex and time-consuming process,” it said, “including in certain jurisdictions where regulatory processes may be influenced by protectionist policies or preferences.”

It also warned that “some countries” — unnamed, but seemingly including China — were considering changing how they decided which satellite operator got a domestic operating license: Instead of defaulting to whoever had spectrum priority from the I.T.U., they’d weigh other factors, including whether the applicant was homegrown.

Global competition

The fight over the commercial exploitation of space goes back decades. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty bars any nation from claiming sovereignty over the moon or other celestial bodies, but it never settled the question of private claims. A 1979 follow-up, the Moon Treaty, tried to declare space the common inheritance of all humanity, but the United States didn’t ratify it, nor did any of the other major spacefaring nations. This has created a policy vacuum.

The Trump administration favors treating space more as private property than as shared inheritance. An executive order in President Trump’s first term concerning outer space flatly stated that “the United States does not view it as a global commons.”

Americans are worried about the European Union’s proposed Space Act, which would impose requirements for operating in Europe that appear designed to burden large non-European operators, SpaceX among them. Researchers at the think tank New America note similar protectionist instincts showing up in regulatory frameworks in Canada, Brazil, Japan, India and China.

SpaceX has “a favorable administration in the U.S. with the F.C.C., but not so much internationally,” said Chris Quilty, whose firm tracks the satellite industry’s financial statements and regulatory filings. Even with global spectrum rights secured through the I.T.U., SpaceX needs each country’s separate sign-off to turn on service.

The F.C.C. deserves some of the credit for America’s leadership in new wireless services. It requires incumbents to use advanced technology to minimize interference and maximize shared use of spectrum. Clever engineering often solves conflicts.

That modernization push by the F.C.C., for which SpaceX has lobbied, has made the United States “the envy of the world” in spectrum matters, said David Redl, executive director of the SpaceConnect Association, a trade group for the low-Earth-orbit satellite companies Amazon Leo, Iridium, Telesat and Globalstar. He ran the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, the federal government’s own spectrum office, during the first Trump administration.

Redl’s group says the tighter bottleneck now isn’t Washington. It’s the “lengthy, often combative” licensing processes operators still face trying to serve customers outside the United States. Each country’s regulator must issue landing rights.

The I.T.U. has struggled to cope with changes in the technology of satellite communications. Commercial satellites used to be mostly in geostationary orbit, about 22,000 miles above the Equator. The I.T.U. assigned orbital slots to them so their signals wouldn’t interfere. But the new constellations of low-Earth-orbit satellites are much closer — mostly a few hundred miles above Earth’s surface — involve many more satellites and don’t sit in fixed positions in the sky.

As a result, the I.T.U. doesn’t even try to assign slots to low-Earth-orbit constellations, a hopeless task. Instead, it gives priority over frequency band use to the first filer. To prevent companies from squatting on unused frequencies, which has happened in the past, it gives them a series of deadlines for putting them to use. But enforcement is weak: The I.T.U. can’t independently inspect anyone’s satellites and relies largely on self-reporting.

Facts in the sky

Global spectrum rules have long been set through international consensus, hammered out at the I.T.U.’s World Radiocommunication Conferences roughly every four years, on the informal understanding that no country would alone move too far ahead of that consensus. The United States, under the F.C.C.’s current leadership, has been doing exactly that, getting ahead of the consensus.

Michael Calabrese, who directs the Wireless Future project at New America, argues the United States should keep the pressure on to “demonstrate the viability” of these reforms, and then push the rest of the world to adopt similar ones.

In the 1970s, when treaties like the I.T.U.’s were first written, only governments had the technology, so governments set the pace, said Harold Feld, a longtime telecom policy lawyer. “Now you have private-sector companies moving as quickly as possible, and you have rivalry between countries,” he said. “Not only are there no rules, there’s less incentive within the structure to create them.”

While diplomats dicker, what one advocate calls facts in the sky keep piling up. SpaceX’s Starlink alone accounts for about two-thirds of all active satellites in orbit, concentrated in the low-Earth-orbit shells best suited to low-latency broadband. Starlink is now something like 60 percent of SpaceX’s revenue and essentially all of its operating income.

But the contingent that sees space as a shared commons isn’t giving up. Hansdeep Singh, a human rights lawyer who co-founded the International Center for Advocates Against Discrimination, says the world needs to act “before a few powerful states and companies are able to create norms that then just become the rules.”

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

Investors reacted to Big Tech’s A.I. spending. Investors pulled back from Meta, which reported big spending and a miss on earnings and revenue guidance for the current quarter, but shares of Microsoft and Amazon jumped after the companies reported big spending numbers alongside growth in their cloud services businesses.

A high-flying hedge fund took a hit. Situational Awareness, a $20 billion hedge fund founded by Leopold Aschenbrenner, a former OpenAI employee, was forced into a fire sale as stocks in its A.I.-heavy portfolio tanked amid a wider sell-off in A.I. and chips stocks. After a wave of margin calls, it offloaded its public stock portfolio at a discount to Ken Griffin’s Citadel.

FIFA halted plans to sell a minority stake. Fresh off a successful World Cup, the governing body announced on Tuesday that it planned to sell equity in a new subsidiary that would manage the commercial side of its main events. UEFA, the European soccer association, said it would boycott the World Cup over the plan, and the Asian Football Confederation and Concacaf, the confederation of North America, Central America and the Caribbean, criticized it. FIFA said on Friday that the proposal would not proceed.

More big deals: Anthropic said its models went rogue during tests. New York sued Kalshi. And Warner Bros. is running out of time to make a “Barbie” sequel.

Knives are out for the world’s oldest bank

A derivatives scandal. A taxpayer bailout. A mysterious death. Since the global financial crisis that began in 2008, Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena in Italy — the world’s oldest bank — has lurched from one crisis to the next.

The Tuscan lender is growing again, but faces a challenge of a different order. A major rival that is also Italy’s biggest lender, Banca Intesa, is vying for control of Monte dei Paschi. In June it made a hostile 35-billion-euro ($40 billion) cash-and-shares bid.

“It’s definitely got a ‘Game of Thrones’ quality to it,” Johann Scholtz, a banking analyst at Morningstar, told DealBook.

The coming weeks could determine the future of the bank, founded in 1472. And the contest to take over Monte dei Paschi could point to how Europe handles mergers and acquisitions in its fast-growing banking sector.

Worth watching: Monte dei Paschi’s C.E.O., Luigi Lovaglio, and his advisers are eager to explore an alternative deal. Analysts are wondering if it can restart stalled merger talks with its smaller rival, Banco BPM.

In his first interview since Intesa’s hostile bid, Lovaglio spoke with Bernhard Warner about his strategy as he weighed deal options as well as the growing uproar from the city of Siena and, this being Italy, the Roman Catholic Church.

“I’m working around the clock to find the best solution,” said Lovaglio.

The full story is here.

Human-free polling

This question comes from a recent Times article. Click an answer to see if you’re right. (The link will be free.)

Wouldn’t consumer research be easier without the consumers? That’s the premise of Simile, a year-old A.I. start-up that announced this week it had raised $200 million in new funding at a $2 billion valuation. Its product allows companies to test the reaction to new products or evaluate how their brand is perceived by polling “agentic twins” of real people created with artificial intelligence.

How accurate are the results?

Thanks for reading! We’ll see you Monday.

We’d like your feedback. Please email thoughts and suggestions to dealbook@nytimes.com.

Follow DealBook on Instagram: @nytdealbook