Cecilia Kang

Retailing giant Amazon remains obsessed with delivering cheaply and quickly, building its own fleet of drones, buying trailers for trucks and signing up drivers for on-demand deliveries.

Registration will cost $5, but the fee will be waived for the first 30 days. Owners will have to mark aircraft with an identification number.

Under the proposal, most drone owners would have to register the machines with the federal government, which would place the information in a national database, the first such requirements.

If successful, the attempt could transform the L.A.-based SpaceX from a pure rocket company into a massive high-speed Internet provider that would take on major companies in the developed world but also make first-time customers out of the billions of people who are currently not online.

Technology companies stung by the controversy over the National Security Agency's sweeping Internet surveillance program are calling on U.S. officials to ease the secrecy surrounding national security investigations and lift long-standing gag orders covering the nature and extent of information collected about Internet users.