>> Narrator: Live from Washington D.C., it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Public Sector Summit. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back, everyone, to Washington D.C. and theCUBE's live coverage of AWS Public Sector Summit. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, alongside John Furrier. We are joined by Jay Carney. He is the senior vice president global corporate affairs Amazon and AWS. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here. >> You are just coming from a panel with Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, where the topic was regulation and tech. I want to hear what was talked about and what your thoughts were there. >> Sure, there were a lot of topics, including the HQ2, which as you know, we're locating in northern Virginia. Senator Warner has a very specific interest in that, and we talked about that a lot. One thing that he's involved in, he's the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the leading democrat on the committee, and he takes these issue very seriously. He's very focused on, especially social media, but tech in general and national security concerns, as well as issues around deep fake news and fake news and the like. Now, a lot of that isn't our territory as a business, but we think that where we do fall into scrutiny for regulation, we welcome the scrutiny. We're a big company, obviously, and we're very focused on serving our customers. Part of delivering for our customers means ensuring that we work with elected officials and regulators and pass that scrutiny well. We'll see what the future brings in different spaces. Our concern, or our hope in general, if it's around privacy or other areas of tech regulation, that uniformity is obviously preferable to having, say, 50 state laws, whether it's around facial recognition technology or broader privacy initiatives. Senator Warner's supportive of a federal legislation, as a lot of folks are both sides of the aisle. >> Jay one of the things that you guys live every day at Amazon, and following you guys for the past nine, ten years now for theCUBE, is you're willing to be misunderstood as a company to continue the long game. Jeff Bezos talked about the long game all the time. Doesn't look at stock prices, all those kind of quips, but the innovation engine has been very strong, and with digital transformation now at an all time high, new value is being created in new ways that some people don't understand. You guys are on a constant mission to educate. Here in D.C., what's clear to me is this awakening of this value proposition, and in some cases, it's not very good, the value. Weaponizing is a word we've heard. Big tech is kind of under a lot of conversations, but there's a lot of good things happening. You guys create a lot of value as a company-- >> Sure, and I think the industry at large creates a lot of value. I think we need to ensure, we, the American people, American citizenry, and on our behalf, those elected officials who ultimately make the decisions, that as we scrutinize and explore regulating some of these arenas, that we do it in a way that creates public benefit, that prevents, wherever possible, misuse of technology, but that continues to allow the kind of innovation that's made the United States the center of technological innovation over the last 30 or 40 years. That's not an easy job, but I think that folks in tech need to work with and collaborate with regulators and lawmakers to talk about how to do that because you wouldn't want, I mean, a good example, I think is technological innovation is value neutral, usually. It's a new service or a new product that can do something. It itself is just a product, so it doesn't have a conscience. It's self moral. How you use it is really what determines whether it's something that's good or bad. Many technologies can be used for good or for ill. We have a service at AWS, a facial recognition service. We're certainly not the only company that provides that service to customers. Thus far, since Amazon recognition has been around, we've had reports of thousands of positive uses, finding missing children, breaking up human sex trafficking, human trafficking rings, assisting law enforcement in positive ways. We haven't heard yet any cases of abuses by law enforcement, but we certainly understand that that potential exists, and we encourage regulators and lawmakers to look closely at that. We've put forth publicly guidelines that we think would be useful as they build a legislative, a regulatory framework. >> (mumbles) asking last night even was saying you guys are very open. He wasn't hiding behind any kind of stories. How do we talk to regulators? We want to embrace those conversations. He wasn't saying, "We want to be regulated." He didn't say that, but he wasn't hiding from the fact that these conversations we need to have. >> I think we understand that the potential misuse of some technology is real. We've seen it in other countries, for example, in ways that violate civil liberties. We want to make sure that in this democracy, that we have an infrastructure in place, a regulatory infrastructure, that continues to allow innovation to blossom but protects the civil liberties of people in the United States. We're a global company, but we started off, and we are an American company, and we care deeply about those issues as a company. >> I think that that's really the big question, is how would this regulatory process work? You're talking about having these conversations, particularly around unintended consequences of these new technologies and services. How would it work? Particularly, someone like you who was in government, now in the private sector, at what point are these conversations taking place, and how might it work? At the innovation stage? At the creation, you know what I mean? Just now that we're really getting into it. >> In some cases, there's real progress being made. On privacy for example, all of your viewers no GDPR in Europe was the first multinational comprehensive privacy regulation that's been implemented. In the United States, we don't have a federal law yet. California's taken steps, has passed a bill, and other states are looking at it. We think for U.S. competitiveness, one law is better than 50 laws. We think that we're fully compliant with GDPR, and it actually was not as complicated for us to meet the compliance requirements as it might've been for other tech companies because of the nature of our business in the European Union. There are aspects of GDPR that I think are unnecessarily bureaucratic or clunky, so there's ways to take that as a base and improve it so that the privacy concerns are rightfully addressed, but innovation continues at pace. >> How about antitrust? We had a conversation a couple years ago to reinvent around antitrust. You made a comment to me, we're faster, ship faster, lower cheaper price, lower prices, how are people harmed? There's been a lot of young academics who are challenging the old antitrust definition. Does digital recast itself in antitrust? This is a conversation that think tanks are starting to have now around what does that mean for the modern era, or modernizing government, including laws of regulation? Your thoughts on that. >> I'm not a lawyer. I'm careful to speak authoritatively where I don't know all the details. Consumer harm is the standard. For all the reasons that you described, our mission as a company is to reward the customer with more convenience, more selection, and lower prices. Certainly, we fulfill that mission and don't meet that standard when it comes to any way you might look at that competitively. Even more broadly, there's a misconception about Amazon. Because we're a consumer-facing business primarily, and because we are involved in a lot of different things, some more successfully than others, that we're perceived as bigger than we are. The fact is retail, our original business, our core business, is the biggest marketplace there is. In the United States, we're less than 4% of retail, and we're not even the biggest retailer in the United States. Cloud, AWS, we're here at the Public Sector Summit. >> You've got competition-- >> We have intense, high quality competition, and deep-pocketed competition. As you know, and your viewers know this, the cloud revolution is in its early stages. The opportunity there is enormous, and we're just getting started. There'll be plenty of winners in this space, so again, I don't see any way that you might look at it, that there would be competitive issues. Also, there's a perception that Amazon itself is singular, so that you buy from Amazon, therefore you're not buying from somebody else, but in fact, when we opened Marketplace, I think in 2001, we opened the website to other sellers. What used to be 100% Amazon product and inventory for sale on amazon.com, has now, 2019, risen to over 55% not being Amazon. Third-party sellers, small and medium sized businesses, more than a million of them in the United States, sell in our store and get access to all the customers we have through our store. That side of our business is growing much faster than the Amazon retail business, and I think it demonstrates the value proposition for all of the small and medium sized businesses. >> Yeah, we've got time for one more question, for Rebecca and I, one, you might have one. As Steve Jobs once said, technology, liberal arts, you've got the nice street signs kind of intersecting, I think that plays now more than ever societal impact has become a huge part of the conversation around tech, tech impact. You're a policy expert. You've been studying it. You're living in D.C. The policy game seems to be more important now than ever before around tech and the participation of technology companies in policy, not just hiring a policy firm, or a team to do it, actively engage and be, as an ingredient of the company. Is there enough people (laughs) that can actually do that, one, and what are some of the key policy opportunities are out there for either young individuals, like my daughter, or other young people coming out of college? Because it seems to me the game is shaping into a new direction. >> The space is fascinating because these issues really are front and center right now around questions around technology and how to ensure that as it continues to evolve that it does so in a way that allows for innovation but also protects private, civil liberties, and the like. You can't be in a more exciting space if you're going to be in the private sector engaging in policy. Even if you're in government, if you're on that side, it's a very interesting space to be in. All of it, tech has grown up, the internet has grown up, and there's no question that with that more attention is being paid. That's fine and appropriate. >> More responsibility and accountability. >> More responsibility, sure. >> I just have one more final thing in this. Because of your vantage point of someone who is in a famously tech savvy administration, the Obama Administration, and then we also see lawmakers questioning Mark Zuckerberg, seemingly not understanding how Facebook makes money, do lawmakers get it? >> I think a lot of lawmakers do. I was just with one, Mark Warner, from Virginia, U.S. senator, former telecomm executive and investor. He very much gets it. The caricature is, I think, exaggerated, but look, that's our job. It's our job, it's the press', it's everybody... One thing we do here with the team we have in D.C. is be a resource of information, try to explain, here's what's happening. Here's how our model works. Here's how the technology works. I think that can only help as regulators and lawmakers decide how they want to approach these problems. >> A lot of innovation opportunities. Just the CIA deal alone is set off from a gestation period, now growth around cloud acceleration. >> I think it demonstrates in a way we're very customer focused, and that is especially true when it comes to our national security agencies and defense agencies, but also that security's our first concern at AWS, as well as at broader Amazon. We're glad to have those customers. >> Thanks for coming by. >> Yup, thanks a lot. >> Yes, excellent. Thanks so much, Jay. >> Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. Please stay tuned for more of theCUBE AWS Public Sector. We will have Theresa Carlson coming up next. (upbeat music)