On May 27, 2026, the European Commission adopted a proposal for a new EU-level authorization regime governing the 2 GHz mobile satellite services (MSS) band — the frequency that lets ordinary phones connect directly to satellites without a ground tower. The move replaces a 2008 framework and arrives as the current licenses held by Viasat and EchoStar expire in May 2027. Under the plan, the band splits three ways: one-third reserved for an EU-flagged operator delivering government, security, and defense communications tied to the IRIS² constellation; a second third for EU-only commercial services; and only the final third open to competitive bidding that non-EU operators — Starlink, Amazon's Kuiper, and others — can actually enter.
SpaceX has told European officials, according to the Financial Times, that the plan "creates a significant likelihood that Europeans will be left without direct-to-device satellite services or that new European operations will create global interference problems, including to emergency services like those in Ukraine." Its sharper objection is structural: the proposal privileges, in the company's words, "an operator's country of incorporation above economic, technical and regulatory realities" — spectrum access allocated by flag, not by capability.
The case for Brussels' caution
The EU's underlying anxiety is not manufactured. A single privately controlled American company now carries much of Ukraine's military command-and-control relay, drone-targeting links, and civilian emergency communications — infrastructure a foreign government neither owns nor regulates. Musk has previously constrained Starlink coverage around sensitive military operations, and this year SpaceX unilaterally disabled unauthorized terminals inside Russian-held territory, an action credited with helping Ukrainian forces retake roughly 400 square kilometers of ground in this spring's counteroffensive. That episode cuts both ways: it shows how decisively one operator can shape a war's trajectory — exactly the single point of failure a responsible policymaker should want to diversify away from before the next crisis, not after. Commissioner Henna Virkkunen's framing of the proposal as building "European capacities in this sector" reflects a defensible reading of the last four years, not an ad hoc protectionist reflex.
Where the plan undercuts its own rationale
The trouble is timing and mechanism, not motive. IRIS², the constellation the spectrum carve-out is designed to seed, was originally due in 2027; the €10.6 billion program has since slipped to a 2029 target for even initial capability. Brussels is proposing to lock two-thirds of the critical direct-to-device band behind European-incorporation requirements roughly three years before its own flagship alternative can plausibly deliver comparable coverage. In the interim, the operator actually keeping Ukrainian brigades, hospitals, and municipal networks online is precisely the one being squeezed into the smallest available slice of spectrum.
Nationality-based allocation also does not address the vulnerability the EU says it is worried about. Restricting Starlink's spectrum access doesn't reduce Ukraine's dependence on Starlink — Kyiv still has no operational alternative at comparable scale until IRIS² or a commercial substitute matures. It simply narrows the spectrum pool available to the system currently doing the job, raising the odds of the congestion and interference SpaceX is warning about, at a moment when the war has not paused for Brussels' procurement timeline.
A second-order risk compounds this. FCC Chair Brendan Carr has warned Washington could take "reciprocal action" if the EU disadvantages American satellite operators. A tit-for-tat regulatory fight between transatlantic regulators is the last thing that serves Ukraine, which needs both governments' satellite capacity cooperating, not competing for leverage.
A proportionate fix is available
None of this requires the EU to abandon diversification, which is a legitimate strategic goal. It requires sequencing it correctly. The Commission could keep the same three-way spectrum split for the long run while adding explicit continuity guarantees — grandfathered capacity, an interference-priority rule, or an expedited licensing lane — for operators already serving active-conflict and critical-infrastructure use in Ukraine, phased down only as IRIS² and its commercial peers reach genuine service parity. That preserves the sovereignty objective Virkkunen described without asking a wartime partner's military and hospital networks to absorb the transition cost of an industrial policy whose own intended beneficiary isn't yet built.
The proposal still needs approval from the European Parliament and the Council before it takes effect, a process expected to run close to the 2027 expiry of the current MSS licenses. That gives negotiators time to fix the sequencing problem before it becomes Ukraine's problem. They should use it — reserving European champions a growing share of the market as their capacity comes online is reasonable industrial policy; freezing out the network an active war depends on before the replacement exists is not.