> No one wants to be seen as stopping innovation, not even the FAA.

That has been my experience. I don't deal with them directly, but we have people on our team who work closely with them when it comes to unmanned aircraft.

The FAA has a comprehensive publication about UAVs: http://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/uas/

What worries me is that whatever regulations the FAA come up with will suit Amazon just fine, but will put drones out of reach of hobbyists.

I would be surprised. Amazon has a history of developing tech for its own purposes, and then selling the tech. Their SOA architecture is now the backbone for one of the largest cloud services platform on the internet.

They might be the go to supplier for commercial drones in the not to distant future, so when they work with the FAA to get them approved (which i'm sure they're doing), i'd bet they are keeping alternative applications very closely in mind.

Remember the "at Amazon, everything is a platform" Google+ post?

Drones as a Service.

Oh, yeah. I could easily see them renting time on unused drones.

Rules for fully autonomous commercial flight might not (and should not) changed the rules for hobbyist, noncommercial flight.

Manually but remotely piloted aircraft (RC planes) are still a huge hobby and the FAA does not currently care how automated the flight is, only that it is noncommercial and that you can see the aircraft from the controls. It's doubtful that the FAA would amend these rules rather than create a separate category for unattended commercial flight.

This is a big part of it. Also, AMZ knows full well that they are a 900 pound gorilla. Going public with this increases the chances that the problem will be worked on by other companies as well. I see it as a similar move to what James Cameron did for 3D production in the years before he made Avatar. He was very smart about getting the industry to move in that direction so that when the time came, the tech was tested and solid.

Shame he didn't spend that time working on the rest of the movie, like plot and dialogue.

I agree. Even if Amazon doesn't end up launching its own drones, you can be sure that Fedex and UPS will eventually. That helps Amazon too.

UPS is a slow moving entity because of its enormous size and culture. Their delivery system was more or less handled manually until about 10 years ago. 15 years ago they were still using punch clocks for hourly workers. "Eventually" could mean 25-50 years from now.

I know that FedEx (and probably USP) are both very interested in flying big unmanned autonomous vehicles (cargo planes) between airports.

Fedex and UPS suffer from the innovator's dilemma which will make it hard for them to build the best drone service with the right business model because it means they'll lose money, sunk investments and jobs relative to their old business model.

Anyway, this is probably a field rich with patents and amazon with their acquisition of kiva robotics and their attraction as an employer in this field with this PR, will grab quite a few patents and make it quite hard for other companies to compete.

If you've ever worked with or for either of these companies you would know how "old school" they are. They can barely keep an autosorter running, I wouldn't expect them to be able to run a fleet of unmanned drones. Also I'm sure the union at UPS would have some feelings about losing jobs to robots.

Source: I worked for FedEx Smartpost/Ground IT for a few years. It was absolutely terrible.

Definitely my thoughts. This article takes a further look at why he announced it so early: http://gigaom.com/2013/12/02/so-why-did-jeff-bezos-pre-annou...

I really don't think the FAA is going to be in a panic over stifiling innovation after this. Probably more people are annoyed with the idea of drones buzzing over their property.