The US government made the single biggest, most impactful set of changes to drone law we’ve seen. Almost every drone in us airspace will need to broadcast their locations, as well as the location of their pilots, in order to address safety, national security, and law enforcement concerns.

Google’s drone delivery subsidiary wing wrote a fearmongering post about the FAA’s decision to have drones broadcast their location.

‘American communities would not accept this type of surveillance of their deliveries or taxi trips on the road. They should not accept it in the sky,’ says wing.

The alphabet subsidiary just wishes they’d send it through the Internet instead of broadcasting it locally. Ian SHERR’s Tweet is apt: wing is arguing that drones should n’t broadcast their location.

The FAA would recommend the FAA ditch its newest radio-frequency ID program for Internet-based tracking tracking. The company is being investigated for antitrust concerns over abusing its power on the Internet.

Internet-Based tracking is exactly what the FAA had originally intended to do when it first proposed the remote ID rules back in December 2019.

The FAA spends 15 pages laying out and contemplating all the objections to Internet-based remote ID in its full rule starting at 60. The FAA spent 15 pages on the Internet-based web-based remote ID.

The FAA is n’t going with Internet-based tracking. The FAA felt it had to choose between’everyone has to pay gobs of money to private industry and trust some data broker with their location’.

Most supporters of remote ID technology, including wing, like to explain that it’s merely a’remote license plate’. For the skies, perhaps nothing more intrusive than you’d already have on your car.

This allows a drone to be identified as it flies over without necessarily sharing that drone’s complete flight path or flight history. That information is not displayed to the public and only available to law enforcement if they have proper credentials and a reason to need that information.

You’d have to be physically following a car to track license plates. That’s not necessarily true of a Internet-based solution like the one wing seems to wish the FAA had offered instead.