 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. So 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, well, I mean, there were a lot of topics, including HQ2, which as you know, we're locating in Northern Virginia, so Senator Warner has a very specific interest in that, and we talked about that a lot. But 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 issues very seriously. So 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 is in 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 and part of delivering for our customers means ensuring that we work with elected officials and regulators and pass that scrutiny well. So we'll see what the future brings in different spaces. Our concern or our hope in general, whether it's 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, 10 years now, but theCUBE is you're willing to be misunderstood as a company to continue the long game. Jeff's face is talking 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 values being created in new ways that some people don't understand. So 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 some places it's not very good, the value weaponizing as a word we've heard of 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. Well sure, and I think the industry at large creates a lot of value and 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. So 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 can be is value neutral usually, right? 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 not itself moral. So how you use it is really what determines whether it's something that's good or bad. So 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 abuse 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 or regulatory framework. He was last night even was saying, you guys are very open. He wasn't hiding behind any kind of stories. We're having to talk to regulators. We want to embrace those conversations. What was the saying, we want to be regulated? He didn't say that, but he wasn't hiding from the fact that these conversations were to have. We understand that the potential misuse of some technology is real, and we've seen it in other countries, for example, in ways that violate civil liberties. And we want to make sure that in this democracy and that we have an infrastructure in place, regulatory infrastructure that continues to allow innovation to blossom, but protects the civil liberties of people in the United States. So 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. Well, and I think that that's the really big question is how would this regulation regulatory process work? And you're talking about having these conversations, particularly around unintended consequences of these new technologies and services. So 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 they're really getting into it. Well, I mean, in some cases, there's real progress being made on privacy, for example. I mean, all of your viewers know GDPR in Europe was the sort of first multi-national sort of comprehensive privacy regulation that has been implemented. And 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 the US competitiveness, one law is better than 50 laws, and we think that we're fully compliant with GDPR and actually was not as complicated for us to meet the compliance requirements as it might have been for other tech companies because of the nature of our business in the European Union. But there are aspects of the GDPR that I think are unnecessarily bureaucratic or clunky. So there's ways to take that as a base and improve it so that privacy concerns are rightfully addressed, but innovation continues to pace. Talk about antitrust. We had a conversation a couple of years ago to reinvent around antitrust, and you made a comment to me, you know, 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 an antitrust? This is a conversation that think tanks are starting to have now around, what does that mean for the modern era, modernizing government, including laws of regulation? Your thoughts on that? So I'm not a lawyer, so I'm careful to speak authoritatively where I don't know all the details, but consumer harm is the standard. And 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. So certainly we fulfill that mission and don't meet that standard when it comes to any way you might look at that competitively. But 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, but they were perceived as bigger than we are. And the fact is, retail, our original business, our core business, is the biggest marketplace there is. And it's, you know, in the United States, we're less than 4% of retail and we're not even the biggest retailer in the United States. And, you know, cloud, AWS, we're here at Public Sector Summit, you know. Yeah, competition, Microsoft. We have an intense, high-quality competition, you know, in deep-pocketed competition. And as you know, and your viewers know, this, that the cloud revolution is in its early stages and the opportunity there is enormous and we're just getting started. So there'll be plenty of winners in this space. So I don't, you know, again, I don't see, you know, any way that you might look at it, that, you know, 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, you know, when we opened Marketplace, think in 2001, so we opened the website up to other sellers. So it's gone, what used to be 100% Amazon product and inventory for sale on Amazon.com has now 2019 risen to over 55%, not being Amazon. So third-party sellers, small and medium-sized businesses, a million of them, 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. So that business, that side of our business is growing much faster than the Amazon retail business. And, you know, I think it demonstrates the value proposition for all of these small and medium-sized businesses. You know, we got one time for one more question. For Rebecca and I, one, you might have one. As Steve Jobs once said, technology liberal arts, he had 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 studied at your live in D.C. The policy game seems to be more important now than ever before around tech and the participation of tech companies in policy, not just hiring a policy firm or team to do it, actively engage and be, you know, as an ingredient of the company, is there enough people 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 be the game is shaping into a new direction. Well, it's, the space is fascinating because these issues really are front and center right now around, you know, 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 privacy, civil liberties, and the like. So these, you can't be in a more exciting space if you're going to be in the private sector engaging in policy. And even if you're in government, I mean, I think if you're on that side, it's a very interesting space to be in. So, and tech has grown up, you know, the internet has grown up and there's no question that with that, you know, more attention is being paid and that's fine or appropriate. More responsibility and accountability, sure. I just have one more final thing. And this, because of your vantage point as someone who was 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. Where do you, how do lawmakers get it? Or are you? I think a lot of lawmakers do. I was just with one, Mark Warner from Virginia, US Senator, Ford or former Telcom executive and investor. He very much gets it. And they're, you know, the caricature is, I think, exaggerated, but look, that's our job. It's our job, it's the press, it's everybody, you know, one thing we do here, you know, with the team we have in DC is be a resource of information, like try to explain, try to, you know, here's what's happening, here's how our model works, here's how the technology works. And I think that that can only help as regulators and lawmakers decide how they want to approach these problems. A lot of innovation opportunities. I mean, just the CIA deal alone has set off a gestation period now growth around cloud acceleration. Well, I think it demonstrates, you know, a, we're very customer focused and that, you know, is especially true when it comes to our national security agencies and defense agencies, but also that the securities are first concerned at AWS as well as at broader Amazon. So we're glad to have those customers. Yep, thanks a lot. Thanks so much, Jay. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. Please stay tuned for more of the Cube AWS public sector. We will have Teresa Carlson coming up next.