A little more research will show that many private organizations assisted in getting recreational drone registration reinstated. Some of those groups and companies are DJI (who blatantly advertise their products as having multi kilometer ranges), AMA, Airline Pilots Association (ALPA), Airplane Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA), TSA, AUVSI, and various aerospace companies. There are a lot of reasons to have the ability to track down a drone owner and most all of them center on criminal or reckless operation of a drone. Personally, I don't like it but I also don't like the fact that semi autonomous auto pilot systems for model aircraft have enabled a great many unqualified and uneducated people to successfully launch a model aircraft from their front porch to go pretty much anywhere they want with no regard for others. That so many post about experiencing "range" issues when their new toy won't fly the way they want 1/2 mile or more away from them demonstrates that many don't give a hoot about laws, public safety, or personal responsibility and hundreds or more videos on You Tube proudly illustrate the dangerous activities they participate in. There has to be a way to curtail those activities and trace the drones they use back to them.
As for the section of Part 336 that precluded the FAA from making laws about model aircraft, there was no such limitation for prevent Congress from making a law, That's what Congress is there for, and "piggy backing" a new law in another Congressional bill is and has been the way things have been done for a long time. It was no secret that a new model registration law was being added to the defense spending bill, and everyone should have realized it was just a matter of time (very little time) before our government re-introduced a new registration law after seeing the FAA's attempt to register models defeated in court.
There's also the "big business" side of things, where large companies, DJI being one of them, are trying to sell their drone tracking software to governments around the world. Our government has a Drone Advisory Council/Committee consisting of many involved in aerospace, sUAS design, aero modeling, aircraft avionics development, our railroads, retail business and other groups assembled for the purpose of developing rules and regulations for drone operations in the USA. Most people have paid little or no attention to what they have been doing but the rules they are developing favor the large sUAS for BLOS commercial operations in our airspace. For those rules to work there has to be a means to track and limit those like us that fly small stuff. The organizational structure for the DAC was pretty much established way back in 2007 with the formation of the first ARC committee, of which the AMA was a silent member.
BobW55,
I started actively participating in fully autonomous flight in 2005. It was clear long before that integration of military drone technology for use in our home skies was only a matter of time. You and others can do it with the H-520, H-920, and all of DJI's systems, but multirotor FC's have been doing it since the release of APM and Mikrokopter hardware. DJI had it on a very limited basis with the Wookong FC. Model airplane autopilots had the ability to do it before that, with companies and individuals flying autonomous systems in 2004 and 2005. It's nothing new and has become more advanced and more available to the public since then. The FAA has been working in conjunction with private companies performing autonomous commercial drone operations in U.S. airspace since at least 2012 to establish C2C frequency and hardware requirements, along with airframe certification specifications. We have a great many "toy" manufacturers, which encompasses outfits like DI, Yuneec, Autel, Walkera, 3DR, and all the others, selling to the general population equipment that is both unreliable and unfinished, having zero certification standards for either hardware or software. The system/component failure complaints with all brands and models are ample proof that none of these systems are "safe" by any aviation standard. Companies have been permitted to sell millions of their toys, from very small micro quads to very large and heavy hex and octocopters to anyone with the money to buy one that could be, and are, operated over the heads of an unsuspecting general public without any industry standard to assure the systems and hardware would continually function as designed. Some even advertise their products as having a range from 2 to 7 kilometers or more, indirectly (or directly if you prefer) enticing the buyers to operate their systems in an unsafe manner in clear violation of the law. Sure, there are times such capability is needed but that capability should not be available to everyone, only those with the training and system certification to assure safe operations.
The sale of product for profit was allowed to take priority over safety and anything that impeded a sale, which includes pre-purchase training and education, has been blown off because any such requirement would reduce sales numbers. It's long past time to correct this and put education, knowledge, training and product quality first and product sales second. Since the government classified model aircraft as "aircraft" in Part 336 we should expect a lot more regulation and control, with registration being just the first step in that process. As things move forward there most certainly will be certification standards implemented, even at the "consumer" drone level. People need to get used to the fact that as those standards are incorporated the price of equipment will rise exponentially, to cover the cost of better components and repeatable manufacturing processes, as will operator training requirements. Corporate operations will not tolerate the existence of cheap equipment having the ability to compete with what they are flying.