The band is 30 megahertz wide, near 2 gigahertz, and it is the slice of radio spectrum that lets an ordinary handset talk to a satellite overhead without a dish. The European Commission proposed in late May to award it through one European selection rather than country by country. On Sunday, Washington’s ambassador to the European Union described what would follow if the proposal survives in its current form: European companies selling into the American market would face retaliation he called “devastating.”
Andrew Puzder made the remark in an interview with the Financial Times published on October 18. He did not name the measures he had in mind, and he framed the warning around market access rather than around one operator. The interview appeared in the same week that Washington inserted itself into Elon Musk’s challenge to the European Union’s fine on X, which officials on both sides read as a sequence rather than a coincidence.
The draft is narrower than the reaction suggests. It splits the band into six paired blocks of 5 megahertz, 30 in all. Two go to a secure government system tied to IRIS², the bloc’s own constellation. Of the four commercial blocks, the recitals favor European newcomers in two and leave two open to any applicant. Article 4 caps each commercial winner at 10 megahertz, a third of the band, so a foreign operator can hold no more than that however the auction falls.
Starlink and SpaceX are not named anywhere in the text. They do not need to be. The band’s two incumbents, Viasat and EchoStar, each hold a 15 megahertz paired block awarded in 2009 and running to May 2027, and Article 20 would extend those rights by two years at the holders’ request. A new entrant would bid into a market where the sitting operators already occupy the ceiling the draft sets for everyone else.
SpaceX has told regulators in several markets that direct-to-device service, the one that connects unmodified phones, depends on terrestrial spectrum of exactly this kind. That makes the European proposal a constraint on a product the company has sold as global. It also explains why the objection came from an ambassador rather than from a lawyer. The case Washington is making is not that the rule is unlawful but that it is unfair, and unfairness in spectrum has a price in goods.
The conditions attached to a license carry their own cost. Every commercial winner would have to serve all member states, reach 95 percent of each one’s population within five years of starting service, and land European traffic inside the Union. For a constellation designed around polar orbits and worldwide coverage, those are engineering requirements as much as regulatory ones, and they are cheaper for an operator whose business is already European.
Brussels has its own reasons. Henna Virkkunen, the Commission’s executive vice president for tech sovereignty, has spent the year assembling a policy that treats connectivity as infrastructure rather than as a market. The secure block exists because governments want a network they control. The selection process exists because 27 national licensing decisions produce 27 answers, and the Commission would like one.
The trade framing is where the argument gets expensive. Retaliation would not land on satellite operators, of which Europe has few. It would land on the exporters that generate the surplus: carmakers, machine tool builders, chemical plants, pharmaceutical companies. None of them holds a position on 2 gigahertz spectrum, and all of them would pay for one.
Puzder’s implicit case is that Brussels introduced nationality into a licensing decision first, and that a rule reserving capacity for European firms invites a response aimed at European firms. The European counter is that governments have always attached conditions to spectrum, that the draft leaves two blocks open to anyone, and that a cap applied equally to every bidder is not a nationality test. Both claims can be true at once, which is why the dispute moved from the technical level to the political one without passing through a courtroom.
The calendar will settle more than the rhetoric. The proposal needs the Parliament and the Council, a process that in Brussels runs on its own schedule and rarely finishes early. The incumbents’ rights lapse in May 2027, and the draft does not say what happens to a block that no European applicant claims, a gap that matters if the favored bidders do not appear.
For European operators, the cap is a ceiling and not a floor, and the coverage obligations decide whether a business case exists at all. For the American side, the threat is credible only if it survives the officials in Washington who would have to draft it, and useful only if Brussels believes it will be drafted.
What the episode shows is how fast a technical file becomes a trade file when one company’s product sits at the center of it. The spectrum rule is still a proposal. The retaliation is still a sentence in an interview. Between those two things is a decision for officials who will have to weigh a satellite service against the price of cars.
