Drones zipping above our cities, landing on rooftops to drop off a bottle of Tylenol or a hot pizza, then flying home to charge their batteries. It sounds like a far-off fantasy world, the kind of futuristic project that companies trot out to generate press coverage but has little chance of becoming a reality anytime soon. And yet two of the world's biggest companies, Amazon and Google, are starting to confidently assert that they have the technology to implement this kind of business now, if only the regulators would get out of the way. 

Last week I attended a panel in Las Vegas that included Google, Amazon, NASA, and a former FAA official with intimate knowledge of that agency's stance on drones. It gave the clearest picture yet of how the biggest stakeholders in the United States are thinking about what needs to happen for drone delivery to take off.