Brad Smith began his career at Microsoft in 1993 . Aside from serving as its president, he is the company’s chief legal officer and the co-author of a new book, “ Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age .” Andrew Ross Sorkin, DealBook editor and columnist for The New York Times, interviewed Mr. Smith at The Times’s first DealBook/DC Strategy Forum. The following excerpts have been edited and condensed.

The world of technology and Silicon Valley now feels like it’s in the cross hairs of Washington and regulators in a way that it has never been before. And the question I have for you is, having lived through the past 10, if not 20, years and the turnaround of Microsoft and everything else, I imagine you get phone calls and you see other executives at rival companies. I’m thinking of Facebook and Apple. I’m thinking of Google and I’m even thinking of your neighbor, Amazon. When you see people like Jeff Bezos in Seattle, what do you tell them? How do you get in front of this? What would you say, given your experience, that they should be doing?

I think that there’s a few things that we’ll always need to think about. I think the first thing you have to step back and think about is: Why is this company in this situation? And to a very large degree it’s because technology has become a tool and a weapon. It is creating rise to so many broad societal concerns. I think the hardest thing for anybody in this position is you have to step back and you have to look yourself in the mirror and not see what you want to see but what other people see. I think you have to acknowledge the problems, because until you acknowledge the problems, you can’t solve them, and nobody is going to believe that you’re trying.

Right now, Silicon Valley is in a very defensive posture. I think that’s probably fair to say. There was an article in The New York Times just this week about whether Apple was placing its own apps higher in the App Store than everybody else’s. Which, by the way, I think you could make the parallel with some of the issues that Microsoft was dealing with when it comes to the web browser war back in the day. To acknowledge up front that, yes, we’ve done this and it’s a problem, does that create more of a problem or not?