New Delhi, Oct. 6 -- When the man who runs Tesla, SpaceX and social media platform X announced last month that his company "now constitutes roughly 2/3 of all active Earth satellites," my instinctive reaction was one of shock and misgiving.

How did such a situation come to pass? An extreme concentration of market power ought to have triggered alarms among competition regulators.

They would have acted if a single firm controlled two-thirds of say, the telecom, banking or road transport markets in a single country. That one has come to dominate the orbital space around the entire planet is a marked failure of global governance.

The failure becomes all the more acute when Elon Musk, SpaceX's founder and CEO, has been quite open about turn...