Alrighty then.

One thing both Google and Amazon seem to agree on, though, is that the technology shouldn’t be baked into the regulation from the start. What they want is an agreed-upon framework that doesn’t suddenly lock the industry — which continues to innovate at a rapid clip — into a straightjacket while it is still figuring out the underlying technologies itself.

It’s worth noting that Google, Amazon and almost everyboyd else involved in commericial drone usage are working together with NASA and the FAA on the Unmanned Aircraft System Traffic Management (UTM) project. The general idea here is to carve out a space of airspace between 200 and 500 feet that would allow for commerical drone usage and to build a system that would allow for managing that traffic. This is a long-term project, though, and the results won’t come in until 2019. Google and Amazon surely would like to fly sooner than that.