[Kye]

How would that help? The ground station that handles local routing to and from the orbital station becomes the target.

[vineyardmike]

I’m not exactly fully bought into the idea (for many practicality reasons) but it seems easier to build many (and replace) ground stations than data centers.

Additionally, StarLink et al are now able to directly communicate with cell phones. It therefore should be possible to route entirely in space between “data center satellites” and communications satellites and communicate directly with an end user device, avoiding the entire terrestrial internet.