The search giant announced that it has purchased Titan Aerospace. Google gets in the drone game

Google is not about to miss out on the drone craze.

The search giant announced Monday that it has purchased Titan Aerospace, a New Mexico company that makes high-altitude drones. Google didn’t say how much it paid for the firm, which Facebook considered buying earlier this year, reportedly for $60 million. Instead, it paid $20 million last month for U.K.-based aerospace company Ascenta.


Google hopes the Titan purchase will bolster its efforts to connect developing countries and offer new ways to collect images for Google Maps or its crisis-response arm.

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This marks the latest instance of big Silicon Valley firms taking to the skies in search of new ways to grow business and improve global connectivity. Facebook wants to use drones to carry the Internet to the developing world, and Amazon hopes to revolutionize its business by delivering packages via unmanned aircraft.

“Titan Aerospace and Google share a profound optimism about the potential for technology to improve the world,” Google said in a statement. “It’s still early days, but atmospheric satellites could help bring internet access to millions of people, and help solve other problems, including disaster relief and environmental damage like deforestation.”

Facebook declined to comment Monday about the drone acquisition or its own ambitions.

Both companies see drones as a vehicle to deliver Internet access to far stretches of the world. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has linked them with satellites and lasers as a means “to bring the Internet to everyone.”

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Facebook launched Internet.org last year to help market that notion. The initiative aims to reduce the cost of Internet access, develop technologies that require less data usage and establish partnerships with local companies. Facebook has teamed up with telecom giants such as Samsung and Qualcomm in the effort. Google is not one of the founding partners.

But the concept is familiar to the Internet search giant. Google last year launched Project Loon, its own balloon-based attempt to bring the Internet to remote regions. It also has purchased a clean-energy firm that makes aerial wind turbines.

Like much of the nascent drone industry, Titan has a ways to go before it populates the skies with unmanned aerial vehicles. But policy-makers already are weighing how to regulate commercial usage of automatic flying machines.

The Federal Aviation Administration is trying to develop rules that clarify how drones can operate in U.S. airspace and has sought to ban nearly all commercial drone activity until then. A federal judge overturned the agency’s ban against small drone operators last month, arguing the prohibition was improperly instituted.

Lawmakers, regulators and civil society groups also have raised questions about how the influx of unmanned aircraft — especially when operated by governments — could change the public’s expectation of privacy. Congress has held numerous hearings on the topic already this year.

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