Dr. Johnny Ryan
speaker
Dr Johnny Ryan FRHistS is the Director of Enforce, and an Enforce Senior Fellow. Previously, Dr Ryan held senior roles in the online advertising, media, and technology industries. He was Chief Policy Officer at Brave Software and Chief Innovation Officer at The Irish Times Group. He is the author of two books, and his regulatory interventions and expert commentary appear in The New York Times, The Economist, The Guardian, Die Zeit, Wired, Le Monde, The Financial Times and other leading media. He is also currently a Senior Fellow at the Open Markets Institute. He is focused on surveillance, data rights, competition/anti-trust, and privacy. Open Marketscalled him “a renowned global privacy expert”. Protocol named him “The thorn in Google’s side”. Tagesspiegel listed him as one of the digital people who shaped 2021. Die Zeit calls him “Google’s biggest headache”. He was awarded the EPIC International Champion of Privacy Award 2023. He currently has litigation and regulatory proceedings in several jurisdictions. He is the architect of class action and other litigation and regulatory complaints across Europe. Dr Ryan works with law makers on digital legislation, and has testified at the US Senate and the EU institutions.
Earlier in his career, his first book was the most cited source in the European Commission’s impact assessment that decided against pursuing Web censorship across the EU. His second book is A History of the Internet and the Digital Future.
He has a PhD from the University of Cambridge thanks to a scholarship from the O’Reilly Foundation. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and member of the EPIC advisory board. He started his career in design, and was Executive Director of The Innovation Academy at University College Dublin. He was an associate on the emerging digital environment at the Judge Business School of the University of Cambridge.
Paul Mockapetris
organizer
Paul Mockapetris, the inventor of the Domain Name System (DNS), is Chief Scientist and Chairman of the Board at Nominum, Inc. His mission is to help guide DNS and IP addressing to the next stage. Paul created DNS in the 1980s at USC’s Information Sciences Institute, where he was later the Director of ISI’s High Performance Computing and Communications Division. Throughout his career, Paul has contributed to the computing research community and to the evolution of the Internet. His earliest work at UC Irvine on distributed systems and LAN technology preceded the commercial Ethernet and Token Ring designs
At ISI, after working on the design and initial implementation of the SMTP protocol for email as part of the birth of the Internet in 1983, Paul took on the challenge of designing DNS, and then operated the original “root servers” for all Internet names. After the formal creation of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in 1986, DNS became one of the original Internet Standards. The IETF continues to be the focus of new applications and extensions to DNS. Paul has been associated with the IETF since its creation, chaired several DNS and non-DNS working groups, and was Chair of the IETF from 1994 to 1996.
Paul was program manager for networking at ARPA in the early 1990s, supervising efforts such as gigabit and optical networking. From 1995 on, Paul held leadership roles at several Silicon Valley networking startups, including @Home, Software.com (now OpenWave), Fiberlane (now Cisco), and Siara (now Redback Networks). Paul’s mission at Nominum is to help guide DNS and IP addressing to the next stage.
Paul has dual B.S. degrees in Physics and Electrical Engineering from MIT, and a Ph.D. in Information and Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine.