NTIA Multistakeholder Process Agrees To Combine Drafts To Develop Drone Best Practices
Participants in the NTIA-driven process to create best practices for use of commercially and privately owned drones agreed Friday to combine at least two of the three competing drafts into one, which would be circulated to stakeholders by Dec. 18. But several issues need to be resolved, such as data retention and usage, security and other matters that emerged during the more than three-hour meeting, officials said.
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Another meeting will be scheduled, possibly in late January, to discuss the combined draft, said John Verdi, NTIA director-privacy initiatives. Participants discussed drafts from the Center for Democracy and Technology, Hogan Lovells and NetChoice, though most of the discussion focused on the drafts from the first two organizations. It was unclear whether the NetChoice draft would be included in the combined document.
Harley Geiger, CDT senior counsel, said after the meeting that he has issues with the Hogan Lovells draft, which participants said was broader and more general than the CDT version. No clear consensus emerged on which draft participants preferred. They said both the CDT and Hogan Lovells drafts had merits but there were also areas that they didn't like in each.
Most of the meeting's first 90 minutes focused on First Amendment rights and free speech. A brief circulated by Holland & Knight on behalf of 22 news organizations including the Associated Press, Reuters and Gannett was concerned that the rights of news organizations using drones for newsgathering might be abridged with the development of best practices.
But those who produced the drafts being discussed said the best practices are voluntary and wouldn't supersede constitutional rights or other state and federal laws. Tom Karol, general counsel for National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies, said the best practices aren't supposed to be enforceable rules nor are they meant as safe harbor, but basically etiquette for drone operators. Some agreed certain types of best practices were needed since hundreds of thousands of drones for private use are expected to be sold this holiday season. Others wondered whether a best practices document would even be followed by drone operators.
Other participants said maybe they were getting down into the weeds too much and the best practices should be more general for both commercially owned and privately owned drones. Participants touched on whether drones have a right to fly over private property and trespass laws, among other issues including how long the best practices document should be. And there were discussions whether the Consumer Bill of Rights and Fair Information Practice Principles should be applied since it was mentioned in CDT's draft.