The CEOs of Facebook, Amazon, Alphabet and Apple will testify at a House hearing today. Read their opening statements here 👇
Chairman Cicilline, Ranking Member Sensenbrenner, and members of the Subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to be here today. I’d also like to thank your staff for their professionalism and courtesy in working with our team over the course of your investigation.
Facebook supports its mission of connecting people around the world by selling ads, and we face significant competition. We compete against the companies appearing at this hearing, plus many others that sell advertising and connect people. We also compete globally, including against companies that have access to markets that we aren’t in.
We built these new products and services because the intense competitive pressures we face push us to experiment with new ideas. We are always working to develop technologies that will change how people connect and communicate in the future, and we invest around $10 billion per year in research and development. We know that if we don’t constantly keep improving, we will fall behind.
People, nonprofits and verified Pages can collect donations from their friends and supporters on Facebook, and so far our community has raised more than $3 billion. To take just one example, the nonprofit No Kid Hungry has raised over $5 million from more than 200,000 donors to help feed children across the United States. We also invest in our communities, and have committed to making over $1 billion in investments in Black and diverse suppliers and communities in the US.
These benefits came about as a result of our acquisition of those companies, and would not have happened had we not made those acquisitions. We have developed new products for Instagram and WhatsApp, and we have learned from those companies to bring new ideas to Facebook. The end result is better services that provide more value to people and advertisers, which is a core goal of Facebook’s acquisition strategy.
We connect people to authoritative health information and we’re taking aggressive steps to stop Covid19-related misinformation and harmful content from spreading. In January, we started displaying educational pop-ups in Facebook and Instagram connecting people to authoritative Covid-19-related information from organizations including the CDC, regional health authorities, and the WHO.
Facebook is a successful company now, but we got there the American way: we started with nothing and provided better products that people find valuable. As I understand our laws, companies aren’t bad just because they are big. Many large companies that fail to compete cease to exist. This is why we’re focused on building and updating our products to give people the best possible experiences.
room. My dad spent two weeks at Camp Matecumbe, a refugee center in Florida, before being moved to a Catholic mission in Wilmington, Delaware. He was lucky to get to the mission, but even so, he didn’t speak English and didn’t have an easy path. What he did have was a lot of grit and determination. He received a scholarship to college in Albuquerque, which is where he met my mom. You get different gifts in life, and one of my great gifts is my mom and dad.
with my heart and not my head. When I’m 80 and reflecting back, I want to have minimized the number of regrets that I have in my life. And most of our regrets are acts of omission—the things we didn’t try, the paths untraveled. Those are the things that haunt us. And I decided that if I didn’t at least give it my best shot, I was going to regret not trying to participate in this thing called the internet that I thought was going to be a big deal.
And it wasn’t just those early years. In addition to good luck and great people, we have been able to succeed as a company only because we have continued to take big risks. To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment. Outsized returns come from betting against conventional wisdom, but conventional wisdom is usually right. A lot of observers characterized Amazon Web Services as a risky distraction when we started.
The company most of you know as Amazon is the one that sends you your online orders in the brown boxes with the smile on the side. That’s where we started, and retail remains our largest business by far, accounting for over 80% of our total revenue. The very nature of that business is getting products to customers. Those operations need to be close to customers, and we can’t outsource these jobs to China or anywhere else.
economy, technology is used everywhere in retail and has only made retail more competitive, whether online, in physical stores, or in the various combinations of the two that make up most stores today. And we and all other stores are acutely aware that, regardless of how the best features of “online” and “physical” stores are combined, we are all competing for and serving the same customers.
And it is striking to remember how recent all of this is. We did not start out as the largest marketplace—eBay was many times our size. It was only by focusing on supporting sellers and giving them the best tools we could invent that we were able to succeed and eventually surpass eBay. One such tool is Fulfillment by Amazon, which enables our third-party sellers to stow their inventory in our fulfillment centers, and we take on all logistics, customer service, and product returns.
Our scale allows us to make a meaningful impact on important societal issues. The Climate Pledge is a commitment made by Amazon and joined by other companies to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement 10 years early and be net zero carbon by 2040. We plan to meet the pledge, in part, by purchasing 100,000 electric delivery vans from Rivian—a Michigan-based producer of electric vehicles.
It’s not a coincidence that Amazon was born in this country. More than any other place on Earth, new companies can start, grow, and thrive here in the U.S. Our country embraces resourcefulness and self-reliance, and it embraces builders who start from scratch. We nurture entrepreneurs and start-ups with stable rule of law, the finest university system in the world, the freedom of democracy, and a deeply accepted culture of risk-taking. Of course, this great nation of ours is far from perfect.
Accessing the internet for the first time in that computer lab set me on a path to bring technology to as many people as possible. It’s what inspired me to join Google 16 years ago. And it’s what led me to help create Google’s first browser, Chrome . . . not because I thought the world needed another browser, but because a better browser could open up the web to more people. I couldn’t have imagined then that, eleven years later, so many people would experience the web through Chrome, for free.
Many are small business owners who have used our digital tools to grow. For example, Fat Witch Bakery is a New York City-based bakery that for decades has been known for its delicious brownies. For over 17 years, Fat Witch and its founder Patricia Helding have been Google Ads customers. The Fat Witch team uses free tools like Google My Business to interact with their customers and to keep them informed, with over 200 reviews on their prole and counting.
Through these investments, our teams of engineers are helping America solidify its position as the global leader in emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, self-driving cars, and quantum computing. For example, last fall, our team of researchers based here in the U.S. was the first to reach a quantum computing milestone, a discovery that could eventually lead to new breakthroughs in medicine and more efficient batteries.
A competitive digital ad marketplace gives publishers and advertisers, and therefore consumers, an enormous amount of choice. For example, competition in ads — from Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Comcast and others — has helped lower online advertising costs by 40% over the last 10 years, with these savings passed down to consumers through lower prices.
Before I begin, I want to recognize the life and legacy of John Lewis. I join you in mourning and hero and someone I knew personally. Getting to host Congressman Lewis at Apple was one of the great honors of my life, and his example inspires and guides me. Every American owes him a debt, and I feel fortunate to hail from a state and a country that benefitted profoundly from his leadership.
To our customers, these are essential to why they choose Apple—and why the keep coming back. We focus ceaselessly on our users and their experience, and we see the iPhone’s 99% satisfaction rating in consumer surveys as not only a key driver of the product’s growth over time, but also our best measure today that we are still on the right track.
What motivates us is the continuous improvement of the user experience, and we focus relentlessly on and invest significantly in new breakthroughs, innovative features and deepening the principles that set us apart. But we held ourselves to an even higher standard. In our pursuit of improving the user experience, we wanted to provide a venue for creators large and small to not only bring their ideas to life, but to reach many millions of users and build a successful business in the process.
For the vast majority of apps on the App Store, developers keep 100% of the money they make. The only apps that are subject to a commission are those where the developer acquires a customer on an Apple device and where the features or services would be experienced and consumed on an Apple device. After beginning with 500 apps, today the App Store hosts more than 1.7 million—only 60 of which are Apple software. Clearly, if Apple is a gatekeeper, what we have done is open the gate wider. We want to get every app we can on the Store, not keep them off.
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