Last week the International Center for Law & Economics, joined by TechFreedom, filed comments with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in its Operation and Certification of Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (“UAS” — i.e, drones) proceeding to establish rules for the operation of small drones in the National Airspace System.

We believe that the FAA has failed to appropriately weigh the costs and benefits, as well as the First Amendment implications, of its proposed rules.

The FAA’s proposed drones rules fail to meet (or even undertake) adequate cost/benefit analysis

FAA regulations are subject to Executive Order 12866, which, among other things, requires that agencies:

“consider incentives for innovation,”

“propose or adopt a regulation only upon a reasoned determination that the benefits of the intended regulation justify its costs”;

“base [their] decisions on the best reasonably obtainable scientific, technical, economic, and other information”; and

“tailor [their} regulations to impose the least burden on society,”

The FAA’s proposed drone rules fail to meet these requirements.

An important, and fundamental, problem is that the proposed rules often seem to import “scientific, technical, economic, and other information” regarding traditional manned aircraft, rather than such knowledge specifically applicable to drones and their uses — what FTC Commissioner Maureen Ohlhausen has dubbed “The Procrustean Problem with Prescriptive Regulation.”

As such, not only do the rules often not make sense as a practical matter, they also seek to simply adapt existing standards, rules and understandings promulgated for manned aircraft to regulate drones — insufficiently tailoring the rules to “impose the least burden on society.”

In some cases the rules would effectively ban obviously valuable uses outright, disregarding the rules’ effect on innovation (to say nothing of their effect on current uses of drones) without adequately defending such prohibitions as necessary to protect public safety.

Importantly, the proposed rules would effectively prohibit the use of commercial drones for long-distance services (like package delivery and scouting large agricultural plots) and for uses in populated areas — undermining what may well be drones’ most economically valuable uses.

As our comments note:

By prohibiting UAS operation over people who are not directly involved in the drone’s operation, the rules dramatically limit the geographic scope in which UAS may operate, essentially limiting commercial drone operations to unpopulated or extremely sparsely populated areas. While that may be sufficient for important agricultural and forestry uses, for example, it effectively precludes all possible uses in more urban areas, including journalism, broadcasting, surveying, package delivery and the like. Even in nonurban areas, such a restriction imposes potentially insurmountable costs. Mandating that operators not fly over other individuals not involved in the UAS operation is, in fact, the nail in the coffin of drone deliveries, an industry that is likely to offer a significant fraction of this technology’s potential economic benefit. Imposing such a blanket ban thus improperly ignores the important “incentives for innovation” suggested by Executive Order 12866 without apparent corresponding benefit.

The FAA’s proposed drone rules fail under First Amendment scrutiny

The FAA’s failure to tailor the rules according to an appropriate analysis of their costs and benefits also causes them to violate the First Amendment. Without proper tailoring based on the unique technological characteristics of drones and a careful assessment of their likely uses, the rules are considerably more broad than the Supreme Court’s “time, place and manner” standard would allow.

Several of the rules constitute a de facto ban on most — indeed, nearly all — of the potential uses of drones that most clearly involve the collection of information and/or the expression of speech protected by the First Amendment. As we note in our comments:

While the FAA’s proposed rules appear to be content-neutral, and will thus avoid the most-exacting Constitutional scrutiny, the FAA will nevertheless have a difficult time demonstrating that some of them are narrowly drawn and adequately tailored time, place, and manner restrictions.

Indeed, many of the rules likely amount to a prior restraint on protected commercial and non-commercial activity, both for obvious existing applications like news gathering and for currently unanticipated future uses.

Our friends Eli Dourado, Adam Thierer and Ryan Hagemann at Mercatus also filed comments in the proceeding, raising similar and analogous concerns:

As far as possible, we advocate an environment of “permissionless innovation” to reap the greatest benefit from our airspace. The FAA’s rules do not foster this environment. In addition, we believe the FAA has fallen short of its obligations under Executive Order 12866 to provide thorough benefit-cost analysis.

The full Mercatus comments, available here, are also recommended reading.

Read the full ICLE/TechFreedom comments here.

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