Why Amazon’s Zapolsky Was Huddling With World Leaders at the UN Last Week

David Zapolsky began his authorized profession in a Brooklyn courtroom prosecuting intercourse crimes. Final week, he stood on the worldwide stage in New York representing Amazon on the eightieth United Nations Normal Meeting, discussing AI, web entry growth and what it means for a corporation of Amazon’s scale to have interaction responsibly with the world.
 
“If you get to be an organization of our dimension and our visibility, individuals need to know what we expect,” stated Zapolsky, 62, Amazon’s chief international affairs and authorized officer. “Now we have investments everywhere in the world, and most international locations worth these investments.”
 
Zapolsky, who joined Seattle-based Amazon in 1999 as the corporate’s first in-house litigator, has steadily grown his remit since turning into authorized chief in 2012. Along with main one of many largest company authorized departments on the planet, he now oversees Amazon’s international public coverage operate—a portfolio that brings him into common contact with heads of state, regulators and lawmakers across the globe.
 
That evolution was on full show throughout UNGA80, the place Zapolsky met with leaders from international locations together with Kazakhstan, Cyprus, Kuwait and Vietnam to advance partnerships round Mission Kuiper, Amazon’s $10 billion-plus initiative to supply high-speed broadband web to unserved and underserved communities around the globe by means of a community of three,236 satellites the corporate is mounting on rockets and propelling into low Earth orbit.
 
“We had a profitable satellite tv for pc launch this morning,” Zapolsky instructed Regulation.com on Thursday. “That’s a part of our work to construct our international web service.”