Amazon joins new initiatives for child online safety and sustainable space operations at the Paris Peace Forum

Standing up for children's rights in the digital environment
Amazon is known for its customer obsession, and a critical part of that is earning and maintaining our customers’ trust. We can only do that by creating a safe and trustworthy shopping experience for our customers and their loved ones. In 2021, Amazon invested more than $900 million and employed more than 12,000 people dedicated to protecting customers and addressing online misconduct. This steadfast focus on customer obsession through a safe and trustworthy shopping experience extends across all areas at Amazon, including child safety. That’s why Amazon became a founding member of the Children Online Protection Lab at this year’s Paris Peace Forum.

This initiative aims to gather governments, companies, NGOs, academic experts and other stakeholders to identify, assess and develop concrete protocols and solutions enabling children to use digital tools safely and benefit from their full potential, without being exposed to abuse and harmful content.

Amazon Vice President of International Public Policy, Susan Pointer, participated in the launch event of the Lab under President Macron’s aegis, and spoke as part of a dedicated, high-level panel. She said: “At Amazon, we take our responsibility for the protection of children extremely seriously across our range of products and services, including retail, video and audio streaming, devices, and more. We are especially proud of Amazon Kids, our family-focused team — dedicated to inventing devices and services designed to ensure a safe, educational and positive digital environment for kids — and free tools that use trust-by-design approaches and provide parental controls to manage screen time and access to content.”

The Lab initiative further builds on Amazon’s involvement in multi-stakeholder cooperation for the protection of children online: at the 2021 Paris Peace Forum, Amazon’s Senior Vice President, Russ Grandinetti, represented the company as a founding signatory of the Memorandum on “Standing up for Children’s Rights in the Digital Environment”, alongside President Macron and U.S. Vice President Harris.

Safe space operations and the long-term sustainability of space
Also at this year's Paris Peace Forum, Amazon announced that it joined the Net Zero Space initiative, and supports the goal of safe space operations and the long-term sustainability of space. During the space track panel event at the Paris Peace Forum, Julie Zoller, Amazon Kuiper’s Global Head of Regulatory Affairs, said: “Space safety is the foundation for a robust and innovative space industry and has been a core tenet of our constellation and satellite design from day one. We will deploy our satellites at altitudes that support reliable deorbiting in less than one year and have designed our satellites to have maneuver capability from deployment through mission and deorbit. We will exchange information relevant to collision avoidance, working with other operators to coordinate operational protocols to determine how each should respond to and mitigate conjunction risk. We believe that operators should know where other satellites are, what they are planning to do, and when they are planning to do it.”

We also joined the first-ever industry delegation to the U.S.-France Comprehensive Dialogue on Space, aimed at fostering transatlantic space cooperation. On November 9, the Aerospace Industries Association (AIA) and the Groupement des Industries Françaises Aéronautiques et Spatiales (GIFAS) convened over 40 French and American companies to share with the U.S. and French government delegations the range of space industry capabilities and the importance of strengthening our partnerships. During the dialogue, Amazon stressed the importance of U.S.-France cooperation to ensure the responsible and sustainable use of space in order to maximize the economic and societal benefits from the growing space economy.

Cooperation in Ukraine relief efforts
Last but not least, Amazon hosted a panel on multi-stakeholder cooperation in Ukraine relief efforts, which brought together Lucy C. Cronin, Amazon Vice President for EU Public Policy; Ambassador de Rivière, Permanent Representative of France to the UN; Ambassador Prystaiko, Ambassador of Ukraine to the United Kingdom; Julia Dailey, Executive Director of Strategy and Operations at the American Red Cross; and Gabriella Waaijman, Global Humanitarian Director at Save the Children International.

Amazon has long been committed to supporting communities in the wake of disasters and crises, always in close coordination with NGOs and governmental organizations. In the early days of the war in Ukraine, thousands of Amazon employees across the world joined together to support refugees, Ukrainian companies, and the Ukrainian State. Support is taking many different forms – cash donations, cloud computing credits, logistics capabilities – totaling $45 million since the start of the war. Amazon has also provided more than 2 million aid items, such as medical supplies and critical relief products. Our Amazon Web Services (AWS) team worked relentlessly with the Ukrainian State and essential institutions to help them secure vital data in the cloud. Finally, Amazon is supporting continued education: we have donated 25,000 devices so far, allowing displaced Ukrainian children to access STEM training, literature and other learning applications in local languages. AWS worked with Optima Schools to support 100,000 students with their remote learning engagements, whilst also supporting “All-Ukrainian School Online”, a program led by the Ukrainian Ministry of Education. And we just launched “IT Skills 4 U”, a free and comprehensive workforce-development initiative to connect Ukrainians with AWS-designed skills training and career-support services. Ukrainians around the world can choose from a range of AWS-designed courses, based on their IT knowledge and learning goals.

For these combined efforts in both humanitarian and digital, Amazon was deeply honored to have been awarded the Ukraine Peace Prize by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. You can read more about Amazon’s assistance in Ukraine here.