Not that ridiculous - there's a lot of important stuff up there, and it's easy for someone careless or malicious to accidentally damage it. Geostationary orbits in particular are very crowded, so it's not going to be easy to get an orbital slot, and if you don't follow fairly fairly exacting stationkeeping, reliability and end-of-life requirements your satellite will drift from its assigned location and disrupt or even damage the other satellites up there.

There's a huge difference between earth orbits and deep space. The reality is that the desirable earth orbits are actually fairly crowded, and allowing completely unregulated access could definitely endanger missions. The differential speeds between orbits are so great that a flake of paint can severely damage a satellite. If we want to have useful satellite missions in the years to come we need to regulate access to space.

You're right, there should be no law- if you want a geostationary slot and another satellite is in it, knock it down. I wonder if Comcast is hiring anti-satellite operators.

The law is ridiculous, but if we learned anything from our history is that if someone can access/control it - someone can own it.