Retiring Silicon Valley Rep. Anna Eshoo on her biggest tech regrets

Happy Thursday! It should be pretty clear by now why X is sending Linda Yaccarino and not Elon Musk to testify in Congress. Send news tips and rants to: cristiano.lima@washpost.com.

Below: Canada and Google strike a news deal, and tech CEOs are set to testify to the Senate in January. First:

Retiring Silicon Valley Rep. Anna Eshoo on her biggest tech regrets

When California Democrat Anna G. Eshoo entered the House to represent Silicon Valley in 1993, the modern technology industry was still in its infancy. Google, Amazon and Facebook hadn’t been founded yet, and the burgeoning internet was just celebrating its 10th birthday.

Three decades later, Eshoo says her district has become “without question the innovation capital of our country.”

“I've seen enormous change where … the internet is absolutely ubiquitous,” said Eshoo, who announced just before Thanksgiving her plans to retire from Congress. She spoke with me this week about her time overseeing the rise of one of the world’s most powerful industries.

(Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post. The Post’s interim CEO, Patty Stonesifer, sits on Amazon’s board.)

But that rapid expansion hasn’t come without major growing pains, she warned.

Long seen as bastions of economic development, tech companies have faced increased scrutiny in recent years over concerns that they have grown too powerful and that their products too dangerous.

“We didn't see 30 years ago … the perils, and how especially social media would be used [for] misinformation, disinformation, what young children are exposed to,” she said.

That has led to some remorse for members like Eshoo, who helped paved the way for the rise of platforms like Facebook, TikTok and YouTube by passing laws like Section 230, the 1996 statute that shields digital services from lawsuits for hosting and moderating third-party content.

“We wanted to make sure that [the internet] was able to grow without any heavy-handed regulations, but Section 230 has a lot of negatives to it,” she said. “We made a mistake with it, and to this day, Congress really hasn't been able to address and correct that.”

Eshoo also lamented some of the work Congress has yet to finish, such as passing a federal privacy law to protect consumers’ personal information online.

Eshoo attributed those struggles to the lack of time that members outside the primary committees of jurisdiction have for those complex issues.

“Members may shy away from making a decision if they don't have to because they don't completely understand all the mechanics in this,” said Eshoo, who has served on the House Energy and Commerce Committee since 1995.

But when asked what her biggest tech regret has been, Eshoo offered up a somewhat unexpected one: the failure to strike an agreement on comprehensive immigration reform.

“We would not be what we are as a nation without immigration,” she said, adding that for high-skilled tech workers, “their green card should be stapled … to their degree.”

“We would be better and stronger for that, and it has a direct impact on the industry,” she said.

As far as achievements, Eshoo pointed to her advocacy for digital equity standards like net neutrality and the expansion of broadband access through the bipartisan infrastructure law. She also cited her work leading efforts to craft standards for businesses using digital signatures, which she said served as a “reminder” that U.S. tech rules can ripple “worldwide.”

As Eshoo prepares to exit after next year’s elections, Congress is only just beginning to grapple with one its next biggest technological challenges: artificial intelligence.

Eshoo, who co-chairs the Congressional AI Caucus with Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Tex.), said one of her remaining priorities this term will be getting her bipartisan bill to expand access to AI research, known as the Create AI Act, H.R. 5077 (118), over the finish line.

The measure would help ensure the benefits of AI spread beyond the private sector to other spheres, like the public, medical, academic and nonprofit sectors, she said

“The computational capacity is really held by a handful of tech companies … we need to do something about this because all sectors … have to be addressed,” she noted.

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Canada, Google strike deal maintaining news in search results

A Canadian official said Canada and Google reached a deal to keep news stories in search results, with the internet giant set to pay around $73.6 million annually to news publishers in the country, Reuters’s Ismail Shakil reports.

“Following weeks of productive discussions, I am happy to announce that we have found a path forward with Google for the implementation of the Online News Act,” Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge said in a statement, referring to the recently passed law that would require tech platforms to pay media publishers for their content.

Google, which confirmed to the outlet that Canada had addressed its concerns about the law, previously said it would block news on its platforms in the country in response to the measure that is set to take effect Dec. 19. The company had argued that the law was “more stringent than the ones in Europe and Australia, and raised concerns about the company being exposed to potentially uncapped liability,” Shakil writes.

Canada’s news industry contends that the measure is necessary to help stay afloat as tech giants have captured a large share of the online advertising market.

Meta, the other tech company affected by the law, has already decided to stop sharing news content on its Facebook and Instagram platforms. As of September, it has reportedly remained unconvinced by draft rules introduced by Canada that seek to address the social media giant’s concerns.

Federal government has stopped warning Meta about foreign influence campaigns

The U.S. federal government has stopped warning some social media networks about foreign disinformation campaigns being deployed on their platforms, a move that reverses a years-long approach aimed at preventing adversaries from interfering in American political discourse less than a year before U.S. presidential elections, our colleagues Naomi Nix and Cat Zakrzewski report.

Meta Global Threat Intelligence head Ben Nimmo said Wednesday that government officials in July ceased communicating with them about such threats. That happened the same month as a federal judge imposed major restrictions on the Biden administration’s ability to communicate with social media sites on the grounds that it was running afoul of the First Amendment.

Naomi and Cat write: “The announcement underscores the far-reaching impact of a conservative legal campaign on a barrage of initiatives established over the last half decade to avoid a repeat of the 2016 election,” notably when Russia attempted to manipulate social media to sow chaos and swing the vote for Donald Trump.

TikTok, Meta, X CEOs to testify in January on children’s safety

The Senate Judiciary Committee has scheduled its planned hearing on child exploitation online for Jan. 31, with the session set to feature Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew in addition to the chiefs of X, Snap and Discord.

The panel initially said the hearing would take place next week but postponed the plans due to scheduling conflicts by the companies.

While originally slated to appear separately, Zuckerberg and Chew will now appear alongside X’s Linda Yaccarino, Snap’s Evan Spiegel and Discord’s Jason Citron. Zuckerberg and Chew are testifying voluntarily, while the others are doing so pursuant to subpoenas, the panel said.

The hearing will mark the eighth time Zuckerberg has testified before Congress but his first since a March 2021 hearing in the House. Chew, who first testified at a House hearing in March, will appear for the first time in the Senate and second overall.

Yaccarino, Citron and Spiegel will be testifying for the first time as CEOs of their companies. Executives at X, formerly Twitter, have previously been hauled in to testify dozens of times, while Snap testified for the first time in 2021 and Discord has never done so.

Daybook

NIST Director Laurie Locascio speaks about emerging technology governance with Johns Hopkins University at 9 a.m.
FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel and fellow commissioner testify to the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Biden-era broadband regulations at 10:30 a.m.
New America holds a discussion on human rights in the digital age at noon.
The House Oversight Committee convenes a hearing on critical mineral supply chains at 2 p.m.
Chamber of Progress holds a discussion on teen online censorship at 3:30 p.m.
The Brookings Institution holds a discussion on Black women in AI and AI model fairness on Monday at 2 p.m.

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I don't know who needs to hear this but:

MARISA TOMEI

is an anagram of

ITS-A ME, MARIO

— Hey, it's Opus! (@heyitsopus) November 27, 2023

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Tobi Tarwater

Update: 2024-07-25

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