But at the moment, officials do not have a quick way to identify the owner of a given drone or to track the location of drones that have been registered by a particular person. Even airports and power plants currently lack the legal authority to track drones, Mr. Govan said.

At the simplest level the proposed regulation requires all drones over 0.55 pound to emit a very particular kind of signal. “Once you have drones that are emitting an identifier then you can have a system that can track all drones,” Mr. Govan said, adding that he applauded the regulations.

Brendan Schulman, vice president for policy and legal affairs at DJI, a Chinese company that is one of the leading manufacturers of small consumer drones, said that for the past several years, industry leaders and government stakeholders had been trying to figure out how to create a sort of drone “license plate system.” He said that the proposed system could make sense. His primary concern is that the cost and burden to drone pilots and operators remain low — something he is still evaluating. (DJI was embroiled in another government drone matter, with mounting security concerns that the cameras and other technology on its drones could send surveillance data back to China.)

But for Paul Aitken, a founder of DroneU, a drone pilot training company in New Mexico, the costs immediately struck him as excessive. The new regulations require all registered drones within 36 months to begin carrying a specific type of remote identification system that broadcasts over the internet.

Often finding an internet connection is not feasible in the locations where drone operators fly, Mr. Aitken said. According to his reading of the rules, if you don’t have cellular service or another way to connect to the internet, operators will have to limit flights to 400 feet laterally, which is roughly to the end of a block — and back.