This paper explores the concept of the commons of the sky in the context of the emergence of convenience-based delivery drone networks above more and more cities around the world. Beyond evident safety concerns, the seemingly relentless expansion of commercial drone operations raises significant environmental, privacy, amenity, and participatory governance issues. These are now attracting rightful attention as critical to effective and ethical regulatory responses (e.g. Zenz 2024). This paper contributes to that critical scholarly movement, by providing a new way of understanding tech imperialism manifested through drone operations. Using the example of Google’s delivery drone enterprise in Australia (Zenz and Powles 2024, in press), the paper frames delivery drones as a particularly visceral embodiment of the patterns of privatisation that accompany incursion by Big Tech into our lived environment, particularly in the context of smart cities (e.g. Sadowski 2021). It proposes that such drone expansion constitutes a modern form of a very old and effective commercial and legal strategy: enclosure and hence expropriation of the commons, committed through collusion with state interests, for private (corporate) use and benefit. Consistent with more traditional land-grabs, expropriation of the sky is supported by its characterisation as a vacant and unused resource. Big Tech’s ambitions to transform this 'dead space' in commercially viable ways seems, in that light, a highly positive development. Drawing on historical, doctrinal and socio-legal perspectives, this paper explores the powerful, countervailing implications of identifying this strategy, and reconceptualising ‘the sky as commons’, for law, regulation and society.
