The first commercial ring of orbital compute will not feel neutral for very long. Once enough inference, continuity storage, and relay arbitration move off-world, the question of ownership becomes political immediately.
At first, operators will describe the ring in ordinary commercial language. Capacity will be leased. Redundancy will be sold. Service envelopes will be priced. But the moment a state depends on a ring it does not control, the language will shift from infrastructure to leverage.
This is why orbital compute ownership is unlikely to remain a pure market question. Regulators will care about which firms control routing. Defense planners will care about who can throttle continuity. Insurers will care about whether failure is local or systemic. Customers will care about whether access remains stable during a diplomatic dispute.
The first ring may still be built by commercial actors, but it will be interpreted through sovereignty from day one. Once compute becomes physically remote, ownership stops being a corporate line item and becomes an argument about who is allowed to keep thinking during stress.