You can’t go to an event in Washington these days without hearing people pontificate about the need to promote innovation. Unfortunately, more often than not, their suggestions are in desperate need of innovation. They produce the same old “solutions”: the engine of creativity that is our federal government must intervene to give a leg up to the “innovators” of their choosing.

No one can anticipate what will happen when engineers, developers, and everyday users discover a new platform and use it to innovate and come up with revolutionary concepts unanticipated by that platform’s designers. That’s what happened with the Internet. The early engineers and users of the Defense Department’s ARPANET system (the precursor to the Internet) had only limited strategic goals that barely scratched the surface of what their innovative platform would one day be used for. In fact, much of the Internet’s core modern functions were initially banned by ARPANET’s administrators. In other words, the Internet as we know it was the product of human action, not merely of human design.

A few years back, my colleague Eli Dourado explained in Wired:

Few could have predicted how profoundly the internet would change our economy. In fact, it was considered “both anti-social and illegal” to use the precursor ARPAnet for commercial activities until 1989. But thanks to the permissionless innovation of an open platform, we now have the internet’s seemingly endless uses — not to mention its economic benefits.

Of course, since we already have the Internet it is easy for us to appreciate the system after the fact. But it easily could have been different. If some groups had their way, the commercial properties of the Internet may well have been squelched before we could know that we were missing out on something big.

Today, we stand at risk of losing another potentially ground-breaking application of government technology to commercial needs: drones. While most people rightly scrutinize drone warfare in the Middle East, drone technology (or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles – UAVs — for you techies out there) alone has ample uses in civilian life. For example, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos made waves last year when he announced that he was considering delivering packages via drone.

Dourado writes:

This lesson matters because today, we’re on the cusp of opening up another such platform for innovation: drones. Like the internet, airspace is a platform for commercial and social innovation.
Until now, only law enforcement agencies and hobbyists have been allowed to operate drones or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and systems (UASs) in our airspace. But six new test sites will soon be announced for integrating commercial drones into U.S. airspace, because the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has been mandated by Congress to do so everywhere within just three years.

He then goes on to warn about over-zealous regulators who would pro-actively try to protect people from harms both real and imaginary:

While we’re talking about commercial — not military — applications of drones, people still have concerns: especially around privacy. In their zeal to protect people from “eyes in the skies” collecting data without permission, privacy advocates want drone operators in the early test sites to be constrained by strict privacy policy requirements.
It sounds like a good idea, but it’s not. Such requirements are unwise and definitely premature, as my colleagues Jerry Brito, Adam Thierer, and I argue in our FAA filing today.
It’s true that opening up U.S. airspace to commercial drones will have some important privacy implications to consider. But it’s even more important that we consider the effect of too-early, heavy-handed regulation on future innovation.

The whole thing is here and is a must-read considering what the FAA has been up to. The piece talks about privacy risks but there are many other “risks” that the bureaucrats at the FAA are trying to prevent by banning “all but a handful of private-sector drones in the U.S. while it completes rules for them, expected in the next several years.” (For a deep dive into the issue, check out Dourado’s, Jerry Brito’s, and Adam Thierer’s public interest comment to the FAA urging regulators to allow innovation in drone technology.)

Dourado was prescient. The move to chain innovation in drone technology with stifling government regulations is well underway. The Wall Street Journal reports:

In four years, Service-drone.de GmbH has emerged as a promising player here in the rapidly expanding commercial-drone industry. The 20-employee startup has sold more than 400 unmanned aircraft to private-sector companies and now is pitching its fourth-generation device.
Over the same period, Seattle-based Applewhite Aero has struggled to get permission from the Federal Aviation Administration just to fly its drones, which are designed for crop monitoring. The company, founded the same year as Service-drone, has test-flown only one of its four aircraft, and is now moving some operations to Canada, where getting flight clearance is easier.
“We had to petition the FAA to not carry the aircraft manual onboard,” said Applewhite founder Paul Applewhite. “I mean, who’s supposed to read it?” Mr. Applewhite, like many of his U.S. peers, fears the drone industry “is moving past the U.S., and we’re just getting left behind.”
The U.S. introduced drones to the world as machines of war. But as unmanned aircraft enter private industry—for purposes as varied as filming movies, inspecting wind farms and herding cattle—many U.S. drone entrepreneurs are finding it hard to get off the ground, even as rivals in Europe, Canada, Australia and China are taking off.

Of course, these rules don’t apply equally to everyone. The FAA has already granted exceptions to filmmakers and a few companies.

The notion that innovators have to ask regulatory agencies for permission is especially galling given the recurring scandals that have exposed the incompetence of the federal government and these agencies to deliver on the promises they make (think about the “If you like your plan, you can keep it,” or “If we adopt a stimulus, unemployment rates won’t go above 8.8 percent” promises); to perform the job they are supposed to do (think: IRS, CDC, VA, and Secret Service); and to be captured by interest groups (think about the New York Fed’s cozy relationship with Goldman Sachs).

Over at the Technology Liberation Front, my colleague Adam Thierer underscores the human costs of such foolish “regulate-first” reactions:

Countless life-enriching innovations are being sacrificed because of the FAA’s draconian policy. . . New industry sectors and many jobs are also being forgone. It’s time for the FAA to get moving to open up the skies to drone innovation. Congress should be pushing the agency harder on this front since the agency seems determined to ignore the law, which requires the agency to integrate commercial drones into the nation’s airspace.

Check out Thierer’s appearance on John Stossel’s show, where he discusses the exciting possibilities of commercial drone use.