Bloomberg Businessweek

 POLITICS Bloomberg Businessweek March 11, 2019

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DATA: SENATE OFFICE OF PUBLIC RECORD, BLOOMBERG RESEARCH

Association, which claims to represent 42 million

people who work in the retail industry, weighed in.

So did Walmart Inc. and Staples Inc., arguing that

the government should hire multiple companies, not

just one, to create online portals from which federal

agencies could order supplies.

When the Information Technology Alliance for

Public Sector (Itaps), a collection of companies that

sell hardware and software to the federal govern-

ment, began publicly criticizing U.S. plans to pro-

ceed with the cloud deal and e-commerce portal,

Amazon swung into action. In emails and phone

calls to Itaps members and staff, Amazon execu-

tives tried to stop letters from being sent to mem-

bers of Congress that portrayed an industry unified

in its concerns, according to four people familiar

with the matter. One person said the Amazon exec-

utives also complained to Dean Garfield, then head

of the public sector alliance’s parent organization,

the Information Technology Industry Council (ITI).

Amazon wasn’t successful, but some tech companies

in the Itaps group interpreted Amazon’s actions as

an attempt to protect its front-runner status in the

federal cloud market, the people familiar said.

The tide turned in Amazon’s favor in July, when

Garfield disbanded the public sector group and scat-

tered its portfolio of procurement issues among his

staff, according to a copy of an email obtained by

Bloomberg. Longtime ITI employees who handled

the procurement portfolio eventually left amid the

reorganization, prompting several companies to

worry that Amazon had effectively silenced a trade

group. Tensions reached a peak in November, during

an ITI board meeting, when Garfield was asked to

address members’ suspicions about Amazon’s role

in the changes. Garfield, who wouldn’t comment for

this article, denied the allegations, according to one

person present who wasn’t authorized to discuss

internal board matters and asked not to be named.

The ITI board nonetheless elevated Amazon’s

vice president for public policy, Brian Huseman, to

vice-chair of the executive committee. According

to another internal email obtained by Bloomberg,

the ITI board also assigned Huseman, along with

Adobe Inc.’s vice president for government affairs,

to lead the search for an executive director to

replace Garfield, who was leaving for a job over-

seeing global public policy for Netflix Inc. Jennie

Courts, an ITI spokeswoman, says the group’s “com-

mitment to public-sector issues, including procure-

ment and advancing the shared interests of our

members, remains unchanged. Any inference oth-

erwise is inaccurate.”

Amazon went beyond trying to muzzle an unco-

operative trade group and launched one of its own.

Early last year, Teresa Carlson, the top Amazon

Web Services executive in Washington, co-hosted

a dinner with two smaller companies to pitch cor-

porate representatives on forming the Alliance for

Digital Innovation (ADI), according to two people

familiar with the matter. The group’s goal would be

to move federal data more quickly to the commer-

cial cloud and encourage the government to adopt

emerging technologies. Jack Wilmer, a senior pol-

icy adviser in the White House’s Office of Science

and Technology Policy, spoke at the dinner about

the Trump administration’s plans to modernize the

federal government’s technology, a spokeswoman

confirmed. Carlson, through a spokesman, declined

to comment.

Since that dinner, at least 19 cloud-based

companies—many of them Amazon business

partners—have joined ADI, the new trade group, led

by former Amazon Web Services lobbyist Richard

Beutel. Notably absent from its membership roster

are Microsoft, Google, IBM, and Oracle—Amazon’s

biggest Washington competitors. John Wood, CEO

of cybersecurity company Telos Corp. and another

co-host of the dinner, is the group’s chairman. The

goal isn’t to support Amazon in Washington, he says,

but to gather like-minded companies that can help

the government adopt new technologies. “This is

much more than any one organization,” he adds.

“ADI is long overdue.” Beutel declined to comment.

As Amazon looks to build a bigger book of

“They’re often

held out as

an example

of how U.S.

antitrust policy

has to be more

aggressive”

2000 2018

Advertising

Agriculture

Aviation

Banking

Computer industry

Financial institutions

Intelligence

Taxation

Consumer issues

Government

Labor issues

Telecommunications

Copyright

Homeland security

Law enforcement

Trade

Defense

Immigration

USPS

Transportation

The Everything Lobby

Policy areas for which Amazon has hired lobbyists, by year

2006 2012