Eshoo exit interview: The Silicon Valley rep on her tech goals

• She's served in Congress for three decades, beginning in 1993 when the internet was nascent and the popular sentiment was to embrace light-touch regulation to not hamper innovation.
• But Eshoo, reflecting in a Friday interview with Axios and looking ahead to her final year on the Hill, said mistakes were made by lawmakers that need correcting, including Section 230 immunity for tech companies.
• "While I understand why we did what we did when we did it, it allowed for a wild west."

The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

What is your top AI priority before you head out the door in a year?

I'd like to see the president sign the CREATE AI Act into law. It's bicameral, bipartisan and I worked very closely with Stanford University's Human-Centered AI institute.

• Essentially what it does is it democratizes artificial intelligence. The huge tech companies today, it's really for all intents and purposes in their hands.
• The president put a policy that's in my legislation in his executive order, but of course an executive order can be done away with by future administrations.

What is your response to people who say federal privacy efforts break down because of California's preemption concerns?

I would agree with that. Californians responded heartily to the statewide effort to bring about a state law, and Congresswoman Lofgren and I wrote a highly comprehensive bill.

• We worked on it for a year before we actually dropped the bill. We sent it out to hundreds of stakeholders.
• It's the floor, not the ceiling. But that's not how the House effort was constructed. And to eradicate or bring the California law to its knees, I couldn't vote for that.

Do you see net neutrality running into the same preemption issue now that states have passed laws and the FCC is taking it on with this in mind?

My Republican colleagues are dead set against it, so it's not gonna go anywhere in this Congress, sadly.

• But I did speak to it when the FCC was at our subcommittee. I said: I've listened very carefully to opening statements, and what you're leaving out of this is the California experience. California has done this and done it very successfully, and it can be done nationally.

How do you maintain a balance of appreciating the contributions that tech entrepreneurs have made to society without being beholden to them?

I remember stopping by some little reception at the end of my days in the district of Palo Alto, and I saw Eric Schmidt. I've known Eric well for decades now, and at the time he was at Sun Microsystems.

• I was very happy to see him, and I said, Eric, what's new? And he said he's just actually signed up with a new company today — Google. I said that's terrific.
• So you know, I've worked well with the companies but when I didn't agree with them, I told them I didn't and it's not personal, it's business.

Do you think the primary reason we haven't seen tech legislation pass into law is because of lobbying?

It sounds like a simple question, but I think it's rather complex. Now the big tech companies have been around for a while, and their products, their business models are in so many ways embedded in our society. And they, too, are caught up in the whims of politics.

• And there are things that deeply concern not only my constituents but the American people, like social media and what children are looking at. Those are legitimate concerns.
• So I've enjoyed the many friendships that have been formed over the years, but I've never done anything out of fear. It's been fair and I'm honest with them.

What advice do you have for the incoming representative?

Never vote out of fear, or your convictions are just going to wash away.