Cable and Wireless, Global Crossing and numerous other companies (dare I say airlines even) are presumably operated on a sound commercial basis with sterling business plans and end up in the hands of the receivers. Wouldn't they be logical people to run a navigation satellite system?
Especially because of recent events I understand that there is a lot (to put it mildly) of distrust of the U.S. but you will recall that from before the Gulf War (the first one against Iraq, not the recent one to finish the job) to present the U.S. has never turned GPS off, has never used SA to preempt safety of flight, and has not charged anyone a penny for the service. The emphasis in many of the posts on this thread is that GPS is owned by the US military. The military may have to do most of the work but in the US , as in the UK and other mature democracies the military works for the civil government. In the US this is taken care of by, among other things, having all the money come from the Congress. The governing bodies for GPS are not military, but include people from other departments and from the councils that advise the president on national security and technology. It could be conceived that GPS could be turned off, I guess, but it would take orders from the very top to do it, just like global thermonuclear war.
The plan from Europe is to set up a Euro organization (answerable to a subcommittee of several EU ministries, which is the same as almost nobody IMHO) that will provide the service. Their plan is to have a contractual relationship between the users and the service provider organization, any disputes or claims for liability go through a binding arbitration. To do this they want a new convention (international treaty) for everyone to sign up. This has been pushed for 10 years at least and has gotten nowhere because the rest of the world is not wild about paying for a system that they don't control and an organization that is not answerable to anyone to govern a system come up with in one region of the world.
While everybody is looking at the sexy satellites the area I'm worried about is the augmentation systems. WAAS goes live tomorrow as a commissioned augmentation system. It uses satellites to provide the augmentation information and has taken longer to build and been more complicated that expected, so it can only be brought to fruition by an fairly well endowed, robust organization. Local augmentation systems will (eventually) be able to be bought and installed for less than the price of a CAT I ILS, with no guarantee that they are maintained properly, by anybody who wants to put one in. If anything bad happens ( and we all hope it will not and do everything possible to avoid it) because of the navigation and landing information provided the accident investigation will drag in the whole GNSS, take forever, and give ample scope for the rumous mongers and (egads) journos to make spectacular hay.
Standing by for incoming