Public Comment Digest: FCC PS DOCKET NO. 26-189
What started as an attempt to better understand exactly what the FCC was asking interested parties to comment on turned into about a week-long deep dive into the filings, stakeholder positions, and different perspectives surrounding this issue.
The deeper we went, the more we started to see clear camps develop—and, just as importantly, arguments and concerns we had not considered ourselves.
For those of us whose businesses depend heavily on autonomous equipment, particularly drones, there is a lot riding on how these policies develop. For Monarch Drone Solutions, understanding the details is more than an academic exercise. Decisions made through this process could have a very real impact on our customers, the products we are able to support, and ultimately the future of businesses like ours.
At the same time, many of the people who could be impacted the most—farmers, applicators, public-safety agencies, small business owners, dealers, and operators—are also the people least likely to have the time to sort through thousands of FCC filings and make sense of the government process around them.
We happened to have the opportunity to spend the time digging into it, so we wanted to share what we learned. The attached document is our attempt to summarize the major positions, arguments, concerns, and proposed solutions that emerged from the FCC comment record. We tried very hard to present the information as fairly and objectively as possible, including viewpoints we agree with, viewpoints we disagree with, and several perspectives that caused us to think differently about the issue.
This is not intended to tell anyone what to think. Our hope is simply that it makes a complicated issue a little easier to understand and gives our friends, customers, colleagues, and others in the industry a better starting point for forming their own opinion.
For anyone interested in reading Monarch Drone Solutions’ full FCC comment, it is available in the FCC’s public record here:
https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/search/search-filings/filing/26110075365
We hope the research is useful, and we’re happy to share it with anyone who may benefit from it.
Dakota Crow,
Monarch Drone Solutions
