The Commons in Crisis: Distributive Justice and the Ethical Governance of Geostationary Orbit and Radio Spectrum

Key Takeaways

• Geostationary orbit and radio spectrum are finite shared resources governed by rules that favor early-arriving, wealthier nations.
• Distributive justice concerns have intensified as commercial mega-constellations accelerate spectrum and orbital congestion.
• International governance bodies lack enforcement power, leaving equitable access as an aspiration rather than a guarantee.

A Resource Running Low

There is a strip of space roughly 35,786 kilometers above the equator where a satellite, given the right conditions, can appear to hover motionless over the same point on Earth forever. This is geostationary orbit, or GEO, and it is one of the most valuable pieces of real estate in the known universe. It is also, by any reasonable measure, running out of room.

The logic is simple. GEO is a single ring. Satellites parked there cannot be too close together without their signals interfering with one another, which means the orbit can only accommodate a finite number of satellites. The best positions, those that sit over densely populated regions or that allow broad geographic coverage, have already been claimed by the agencies and companies of wealthy, technologically advanced nations. Countries that came late to the space age have arrived to find the best seats taken.

That situation raises a question that has never been fully resolved: who has the right to use these shared resources, and on what ethical basis are those rights allocated?

The Spectrum Problem and the ITU

The answer, such as it is, lies with the International Telecommunication Union, the UN agency responsible for coordinating global use of the radio spectrum and managing satellite orbital slots. Founded in 1865 as the International Telegraph Union, the ITU predates space exploration by nearly a century and has evolved to govern what is now one of the most contested resources in the commercial economy.

The ITU’s satellite coordination framework operates on a “first come, first served” basis for orbital slots and associated frequency assignments. A country that files a coordination request and successfully completes the process, including a seven-year window to bring the satellite into service, secures rights to that orbital position and spectrum band. Countries that file later must coordinate with earlier filers to avoid harmful interference, which in practice means negotiating or deferring.

The ethical problem with this system is that it systematically advantages wealthier countries and their commercial industries. The United States, Russia, members of the European Space Agency, Japan, and China filed early and extensively. They hold large portfolios of orbital slots and frequency assignments. Developing nations in Africa, Southeast Asia, and South America, which were still building basic telecommunications infrastructure while the wealthiest countries were filling the sky with satellites, arrived at the ITU table to find their options constrained.

This is not merely a procedural inequity. Radio spectrum and geostationary orbit are defined under international space law as the “common heritage of mankind,” a phrase that appears in the Moon Agreement of 1979 and that has been applied by extension to orbital resources. A resource designated as common heritage is supposed to be managed for the benefit of all, not allocated on the basis of who got there first. The gap between that principle and the ITU’s operational framework is substantial.

Paper Satellites and Spectrum Squatting

The incentives created by the first-come-first-served system have produced a phenomenon known as “paper satellites.” Countries or companies file coordination requests for orbital slots and frequency assignments they have no near-term intention of using, with the goal of securing rights that can later be used, traded, or leased. Because the ITU charges minimal fees for coordination filings, the cost of reserving an orbital slot is trivial relative to its potential value.

Tonga became one of the most discussed examples of this phenomenon in the 1990s and early 2000s, when it filed for more than a dozen geostationary orbital slots and subsequently leased several of them to foreign satellite operators. Tonga, a Pacific island nation with no domestic satellite manufacturing capability, was using ITU rules to extract value from a global commons it had no practical ability to exploit independently. Whether that constitutes clever resource management by a small developing nation or an abuse of a system designed to ensure equitable access depends entirely on which ethical framework is applied.

Other cases are less ambiguous. Large satellite operators have held orbital slots in reserve for years or decades, using coordination filings to block competitors from occupying adjacent positions. The ITU has mechanisms to address non-use, including the requirement to bring a satellite into service within seven years, but enforcement has historically been weak. A 2022 ITU study identified hundreds of filings where satellites had not been brought into service within the required period, with limited consequences for the filing entities.

The Mega-Constellation Shock

The ethical stakes around spectrum and orbital access escalated sharply with the emergence of low Earth orbit mega-constellations. SpaceX’s Starlink, Amazon’s Kuiper, OneWeb, and Telesat Lightspeed have collectively filed for hundreds of thousands of satellites in LEO, with Starlink having already deployed more than 6,000 as of early 2025.

These constellations do not use geostationary orbit, but they consume enormous quantities of radio spectrum. They also raise new coordination challenges because, unlike GEO satellites, LEO satellites move continuously, meaning their signals sweep across much larger geographic areas. The potential for interference with other systems, including the GEO satellites that remain the primary communications infrastructure for large portions of the developing world, is real and technically complex.

In 2022, the FCC authorized SpaceX to expand Starlink’s Gen 2 constellation to as many as 30,000 satellites, then partially reversed that authorization after competitors including Hughes Network Systems, ViaSat, and Dish Network filed objections. The dispute illustrates a recurring pattern: companies with existing spectrum rights arguing that new entrants are claiming spectrum in ways that reduce the usable value of earlier grants.

For developing countries that rely on GEO-based systems for national communications infrastructure, the proliferation of LEO mega-constellations presents a different kind of threat. Spectrum that was allocated to support GEO services used by developing-world operators may face interference or effective crowding-out from the operations of wealthy-country commercial constellations. Intelsat, which operates a large GEO fleet serving much of Africa and the developing world, has raised this concern at the ITU, arguing that the organization’s coordination frameworks were not designed for multi-thousand-satellite deployments.

Distributive Justice as an Analytical Framework

Distributive justice is the branch of ethics concerned with the fair allocation of benefits and burdens across a society or, in the case of global commons, across humanity. The most widely cited framework comes from philosopher John Rawls, whose Theory of Justice argues that inequalities in the distribution of social goods are only justifiable if they benefit the least advantaged members of society.

Applying a Rawlsian lens to geostationary orbit and radio spectrum is illuminating and uncomfortable. The current distribution of orbital and spectral resources does not benefit the world’s least advantaged countries. It benefits wealthy countries and the private commercial entities they license. The orbital slots that a developing nation in Central Africa might use to deploy a national communications satellite have in many cases already been allocated to operators in Europe or North America that have more efficient technologies and can serve more customers from those positions.

A competing framework draws on utilitarian principles. If the goal is to maximize aggregate global welfare, then allocating spectrum to the most technically capable operators, who can serve the most users with the most reliable connectivity, might produce better overall outcomes than reserving spectrum for less capable operators in the name of equity. Starlink provides internet to millions of people who lacked it. That is a social benefit. Whether it justifies the concentrated allocation of spectrum to a single American private company is a separate question.

A third framework, grounded in commons theory as developed by Elinor Ostrom, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009 for her work on the governance of shared resources, suggests that neither pure market allocation nor rigid regulatory assignment produces optimal outcomes. Ostrom’s research showed that communities can sustainably manage common resources when they develop locally appropriate rules, enforce them with graduated sanctions, and ensure that users have meaningful participation in governance. Applied to orbit and spectrum, this framework points toward international governance institutions with real enforcement power and representation for developing nations, neither of which currently exists at adequate scale.

The ITU’s Democratic Deficit

The ITU operates through a system of member states and sector members, with voting rights formally distributed among its 193 member states. In principle, this makes the ITU more democratically representative than most international technical bodies. In practice, the countries with the largest commercial space and telecommunications industries exercise disproportionate influence through their ability to staff expert groups, fund participation in coordination processes, and negotiate bilateral agreements outside the ITU framework.

Participation in ITU coordination processes requires technical expertise and legal resources that many developing countries simply cannot afford. A country negotiating orbital coordination with a constellation operator that has a team of dozens of engineers and lawyers is not engaging on equal terms, regardless of formal voting equality.

This democratic deficit has been raised explicitly by delegations from African and Latin American countries at ITU World Radiocommunication Conferences. The 2023 World Radiocommunication Conference in Dubai, known as WRC-23, addressed spectrum allocations for satellite services across multiple bands and saw significant disagreement between developed and developing country delegations about how to handle the competing demands of new LEO systems and existing GEO infrastructure. No comprehensive solution emerged, though some incremental adjustments were agreed.

Equity-Oriented Reform Proposals

Several proposals have been advanced for making the governance of orbital and spectral resources more equitable, with varying degrees of feasibility.

One proposal involves orbital slot reservations for developing countries, similar in concept to spectrum set-asides in domestic telecommunications regulation. The ITU could designate a percentage of valuable orbital positions as reserved for developing-country filings, protecting them from occupation by wealthier-country operators. The practical challenges are substantial: determining which slots to reserve, defining which countries qualify, and managing the transition from current allocations without disrupting existing services.

A second approach involves global spectrum license fees with revenues redistributed to developing countries. Under this model, operators of large commercial constellations would pay fees proportional to their spectrum use, with the proceeds funding connectivity infrastructure in underserved regions. The International Development Association, the World Bank affiliate that finances development projects in low-income countries, has explored connectivity infrastructure as a development priority. Linking spectrum revenue to connectivity investment could create a feedback loop between commercial space activity and global digital equity.

A third proposal, advanced by academics including those associated with the European Space Policy Institute in Vienna, involves developing multilateral agreements on responsible constellation deployment that explicitly incorporate equity criteria. Such agreements would not eliminate first-come-first-served allocation but would require constellation operators to demonstrate that their deployments do not foreclose access by developing-country operators to technically viable orbital positions.

None of these proposals is close to adoption. The countries and companies with the most to lose from any redistribution of orbital rights are also the countries and companies with the most influence over the bodies that would have to negotiate such reforms.

The Spectrum Auction Model and Its Limits

Some analysts have proposed replacing the ITU’s administrative allocation system with market mechanisms, including spectrum auctions in which orbital slots and frequency bands are sold to the highest bidder. Proponents argue that market pricing would allocate resources to their most productive uses, generate revenue for the international community, and reduce the waste associated with paper satellite filings.

The objection from a distributive justice standpoint is obvious. If orbital slots are auctioned, wealthy commercial operators will outbid developing-country national agencies in almost every case. The outcome would be a system even more skewed toward wealthy-country interests than the current one. The United Nations principle that space resources are common heritage of mankind is fundamentally incompatible with privatizing the allocation of orbital rights through market mechanisms, even if market mechanisms might improve efficiency.

There is also the question of what happens to countries that currently hold orbital slots they obtained under the existing administrative system. Any transition to auctioning would need to address incumbent rights, and incumbents in GEO have strong legal and political grounds to resist any retroactive changes to their allocations.

A Question Without a Clean Answer

It is worth sitting with the difficulty here. The ITU was designed to prevent harmful interference, not to achieve global equity. Its coordination rules have evolved incrementally over decades, and the political economy of its member states makes fundamental reform extraordinarily difficult. The commercial pressures pushing for more satellites, more spectrum, and faster deployment are enormous and will not abate.

At the same time, the ethical case for the status quo is weak. A system in which the orbital positions most useful for a developing nation’s communications infrastructure were claimed decades ago by operators in wealthy countries, and are now being crowded further by privately financed mega-constellations, does not resemble a system that manages a common heritage for the benefit of all. The gap between the principle and the practice is large enough to constitute a structural injustice, even if no single actor intended that outcome.

Summary

Geostationary orbit and radio spectrum are shared resources of finite capacity. Their current governance, built around a first-come-first-served allocation model administered by the ITU, systematically advantages wealthy nations and their commercial industries at the expense of developing countries that arrived too late to claim prime positions. Distributive justice frameworks from Rawls to Ostrom all point toward the same conclusion: the current system falls far short of equitable governance of a resource that belongs, in principle, to all of humanity. Reform is possible, through reserved allocations, spectrum fees, or strengthened multilateral governance, but the political will to pursue it has so far not materialized at the scale the problem demands.

Appendix: Top 10 Questions Answered in This Article

What is geostationary orbit and why is it valuable?
Geostationary orbit is a circular orbit approximately 35,786 kilometers above Earth’s equator where satellites appear stationary relative to the ground. Its value lies in its utility for communications, broadcasting, and weather monitoring, combined with its finite capacity to host satellites without mutual interference.

Who governs the allocation of geostationary orbital slots?
The International Telecommunication Union, a United Nations agency, manages the coordination of geostationary orbital slots and the radio spectrum frequencies associated with them. Its framework operates on a first-come-first-served basis for countries that successfully complete the coordination process.

What are paper satellites and why are they a problem?
Paper satellites are orbital slot filings submitted by countries or companies with no near-term intention of deploying a satellite. They allow filers to reserve valuable orbital positions at low cost, often blocking access by other parties, and have been a recognized abuse of the ITU coordination system.

How do mega-constellations like Starlink affect spectrum access for developing countries?
Low Earth orbit mega-constellations consume large portions of radio spectrum and can cause interference with geostationary satellite systems that developing countries rely on for national communications infrastructure. The scale of constellation deployments was not anticipated by the ITU’s coordination frameworks.

What does distributive justice mean in the context of orbital resources?
Distributive justice refers to the fair allocation of shared benefits and burdens. Applied to orbital resources, it asks whether the current system of orbital slot and spectrum allocation produces outcomes that are equitable across all nations, particularly between wealthy and developing countries.

What is the Rawlsian critique of the ITU’s allocation framework?
John Rawls argued that inequalities in the distribution of social goods are only justified if they benefit the least advantaged. The ITU’s allocation framework, which concentrates valuable orbital resources in wealthy countries, does not meet this standard and can be characterized as structurally unjust from a Rawlsian perspective.

What did the 2023 World Radiocommunication Conference address?
WRC-23, held in Dubai, addressed spectrum allocations for satellite services and saw significant disagreement between developed and developing country delegations over how to balance the needs of new LEO constellation systems against the requirements of existing geostationary infrastructure serving developing regions.

What is Elinor Ostrom’s relevance to space resource governance?
Elinor Ostrom’s research on commons governance showed that shared resources can be sustainably managed when users have meaningful participation in rule-making and enforcement. Applied to orbit and spectrum, her work supports multilateral governance with representation for developing nations rather than pure market or first-come-first-served allocation.

What are the main reform proposals for more equitable orbital governance?
Proposed reforms include reserving orbital slots for developing countries, imposing spectrum license fees on large constellation operators with revenues redistributed to underserved regions, and developing multilateral agreements requiring constellation operators to demonstrate that their deployments preserve viable access for developing-country operators.

Why is market-based spectrum auctioning problematic from an equity standpoint?
If orbital slots were auctioned to the highest bidder, wealthy commercial operators would outbid developing-country national agencies in most cases, producing a system even more concentrated in favor of wealthy-country interests. This outcome is incompatible with the international legal principle that space resources are the common heritage of mankind.