The race for the airborne internet is on.

According to multiple reports, Facebook is in talks to buy a drone maker whose solar-powered aircraft could operate as high-altitude wireless hot spots, circling in the stratosphere for years without refueling. That may seem far-fetched, but it's not entirely surprising in the context of today's online rivalries. Witness Google, Facebook's chief nemesis, which is already running its own high-speed internet service down here on the earth – the ever-expanding Google Fiber – not to mention the balloons it's building to bring internet access to more remote locations from high in the sky.

>Instead of the intensive, intrusive labor of digging trenches and laying pipes, just send more drones up in the air to bring more homes online.

In revealing that Facebook is exploring a $60 million acquisition of drone maker Titan Aerospace, Techcrunch reports that the deal is a way of giving wings to Mark Zuckerberg's Interneth.org initiative, another effort to bring the net to those parts of the globe that are still offline. Zuckerberg describes this as a philanthropic effort – and it may well be. But it's certainly in Facebook's interest as a business to expand the reach of the internet, just as it is for Google.

Google and Facebook are primarily in the business of running web services – and delivering ads on those services. But if these two public companies are to keep expanding, as their shareholders crave, that growth may ultimately depend on the spread of the internet itself. The more people that have access to the internet, the more potential Facebook and Google users.

In some respects, this gives the two companies more incentive to grow the net themselves rather than waiting for the old-school ISPs of the world – and they have to money to grow it. At the very least, drones as a way to deliver internet access makes more sense than drones as a way to deliver toothpaste.

Leaving Earthbound ISPs Behind ——————————

Last year, Google began testing Project Loon balloons over New Zealand. The project is an offshoot of the secretive Google X skunkworks, which takes seemingly crazy ideas (self-driving cars, Google Glass) and tries to make them real. Much like Facebook, as it prepares to bring the internet to the hinterlands, Google gives this effort an altruistic veneer. But it's worth pointing out that this is the company's second internet service initiative.

The first is Google Fiber, the search giant's ultra-high-speed gambit to become an internet service provider by laying its own cables in the ground. A few U.S. cities already have the promised 1-gigabit-per-second service, and Google recently announced it's exploring plans to bring Fiber to many more. The company says it wants to see what kind of civic good can come to cities wired up with even faster internet speeds. But establishing such an infrastructure also pushes telecom and cable companies to offer their own high-speed services, which helps Google deliver its own services faster. Ultimately, Fiber may even give Google insurance against the hassles it could face from incumbent ISPs newly empowered to set up internet roadblocks as net neutrality protections disappear.

For now, net neutrality isn't necessarily as big an issue for Facebook. After all, status updates don't take up nearly as much bandwidth as YouTube videos. But a company as ambitious as Facebook is always thinking ahead, and drones could give the social network a way to go one better than Google by focusing on putting the internet in the air instead of in the ground. The idea of an airborne internet has been discussed for a long time, but it will likely take a company with the resources of a Facebook or a Google to bring the concept into the real world.

From a logistics standpoint, the sky seems like much more efficient, scalable way to build connectivity. Instead of the intensive, intrusive labor of digging trenches and laying pipes, just send more drones up in the air to bring more homes online. If the drones can really stay aloft the way Titan says they can, there's way more space available in the sky than there is down below.

As they become the world's largest companies, all the internet giants will likely want to control as much of the infrastructure between themselves and their users as possible. For Larry Page or Mark Zuckerberg, the idea of depending in any way on old-school outfits like Verizon or Comcast must grate. For both, taking to the skies must seem an especially gratifying way to leave such earthbound adversaries behind.