Andrew McLaughlin is Senior Policy Counsel for Google Inc. He is a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Berkman Center, living in New York City.

Working at the intersection of law, politics, economics, and technology, Andrew's Berkman Center work has principally taken the form of projects to expand Internet infrastructure in developing countries. He has assisted governments, NGOs, and private sector actors to understand and analyze Internet and communications technologies; to reform their laws, policies, and regulations; and to foster favorable environments for local technology entrepreneurship.

Background

Andrew is Senior Policy Counsel for Google Inc., based in New York City. He is a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, where his work has focused on the law and regulation of Internet and telecommunications networks. In recent years, he has focused primarily on developing countries, including Ghana, Mongolia, Kenya, Afghanistan, and South Africa. Since joining Google, Andrew has continued that work as a member of the Board of Directors of Bridges.org, an international non-profit organisation based in Cape Town that promotes the effective use of information and communications technology in the developing world to reduce poverty and improve citizens' lives.

Andrew first joined the Berkman Center in 1998 as an Associate Director and Fellow, studying the Internet's technical administration and self-regulation and on the application of constitutional law doctrines to cyberspace. He worked on online mechanisms to facilitate democratic consultation in cyberspace using the model of Deliberative Polling. In 1999, Andrew taught The Law of Cyberspace with Prof. Jonathan Zittrain. He returned to the Berkman Center in 2002, to lead the Berkman Center's initiatives in developing countries. In 2003, he taught Digital Democracy with Prof. Charles Nesson.

From 1999-2002, Andrew helped to launch and manage the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), serving as Vice President, Chief Policy Officer, and Chief Financial Officer. ICANN is the global non-profit organization responsible for coordinating the Internet's systems of unique identifiers, such as domain names and IP addresses.

In 2000, Time named Andrew one of its Digital Dozen. In 2001, he was named a Global Leader for Tomorrow by the World Economic Forum. He is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

After graduating from the Harvard Law School in 1994, McLaughlin clerked for Judge Gerald W. Heaney of the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. From 1995-97, he worked as an associate at Jenner & Block in Washington, D.C., where he was a member of the team that successfully litigated the challenge to the Communications Decency Act, culminating in the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Reno v. ACLU, 117 S.Ct. 2329 (1997). From 1997-98, he served as Counsel to Congressman Henry Waxman of Los Angeles, the ranking Democrat on the House of Representatives’ campaign finance investigation.

A native of Minnesota and North Dakota, McLaughlin graduated from Yale University in 1991 with a B.A. in history. As a law student, he was a member of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau.

A number of Andrew's ICANN-related presentations are posted here.

Some photos.

Recent Projects

• Publications:
  • Introduction to Internet Architecture and Institutions, with Ethan Zuckerman (August 2003).
  • Analysis and Critique of Mongolia's Draft Law on Information Technology (October 2003)
  • Bad Journalism, IPv6, and the BBC (CircleID, November 2003)
  • The Virtues of Deliberative Policymaking: A Reponse to "Public Participation in ICANN" (December 2003)
• Serving on the board of Bridges.org.
• Co-teaching Digital Democracy, Fall 2003.
• Blogging at C-Note and xDev.
• Working in Ghana with Geekcorps and Ethan Zuckerman, on a range of Internet and communications technology issues.
• Working with Geekcorps and the Open Society Institute on communications law and policy issues in Mongolia. While in Ulaanbaatar in June, Andrew kept a weeklong Diary for Slate. Andrew is advising the government and the private sector on the drafting of a new information technology law, and recently published a comprehensive Analysis and Critique of Mongolia's Draft Law on Information Technology.
• Leading a Berkman Center initiative to support the establishment of Internet exchange points (IXPs) in Africa and South Asia. The project is a effort to assist Internet service providers (ISPs), networking professionals, government regulators, and others in creating legal & regulatory frameworks that will foster (rather than obstruct) interconnection through the creation of neutral Internet exchange facilities. IXPs enable in-country routing of locally-bound Internet traffic, and are essential elements of Internet infrastructure for most developing nations. Writing a case study on the establishment of the KIXP in Nairobi, Kenya.
• Assisting the Afghan Ministry of Communications to understand its Internet policy options, make choices, and draft a national telecommunications and Internet policy that will promote rapid deployment of reliable, affordable voice and data services. The resulting Telecommunications and Internet Policy was published in July 2003, and has been adopted by the Islamic Transitional Government of Afghanistan.
• With Ethan Zuckerman, taught a module on technical architectures for the spring 2003 Berkman Online Lecture & Discussion (BOLD) series on Development and the Internet.
• With Ethan Zuckerman, taught a course at the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) Campus on Information and Communication Technologies and Diplomacy, New York, 22 August 2003.
• Researching the technical and policy aspects of geolocation by means of Internet protocol (IP) addresses -- particularly in the areas of content control and taxation, where some governments and courts have been positing the use of IP addresses as a mechanism for the enforcement of geographic borders in cyberspace.
• Served as a member of ICANN's Internationalized Domain Name Registry Implementation Committee (IDN-RIC), which is helping to coordinate the deployment of non-ASCII domain names by DNS registries, using the Internationalized Domain Names in Applications (IDNA) protocols. (IDNA is defined in the recenly-published standards-track RFCs 3490, 3491, and 3492).

Where Andrew's been lately:

• Spoke at the Nikkei Digital Core mid-year Conference on Internet Governance, Tokyo, Japan, August 2004
• Participated in the American Constitution Society's annual convention, Washington, DC, June 2004.
• Attended the D2: All Things Digital conference, Carlsbad, CA, June 2004.
• Attended the Personal Democracy Forum, New York, NY, May 2004.
• Spoke at China's Digital Future: The Impact of Information and Communications Technologies on Chinese Society, Berkeley, CA, April 2004.
• Spoke at the FTC Spyware Workshop, Washington, DC, April 2004 (presentation).
• Spoke at a Congressional briefing on "Net Neutrality", Washington, DC, March 2004.
• Participated in the World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland, 21-26 January 2004.
• In Accra, Ghana, 9-20 January 2004, with Geekcorps and Ethan Zuckerman, consulting on Ghana's technology-related laws and policies, and promoting an Internet exchange point (IXP) for Ghana's ISPs. Ethan I hosted the first BlogAfrica workshop at Busy Internet; click here for the presentation notes.
• In Johannesburg, South Africa, keynoting the iWeek conference, 11-21 September 2003. Talks: "Distributing the Future: Regulation and the Future of IT in Africa," (warning: huge .ppt file) and "ccTLD Redelegation/Internet Governance"
• In Montreal, Canada, participating in the ICANN meeting, 22-26 June 2003. Issues: Implementation of internationalized domain name protocols in the DNS; Whois policy; new top-level domains.
• In Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, with Geekcorps, 6-20 June 2003.
• Participating in the ICANN meeting in Rio de Janeiro, 27-31 March 2003.
• Presentation at Civil Liberties in Cyberspace, Institute of Politics, Kennedy School of Government, 24 February 2003: "Civil Liberties in Cyberspace: An Introduction".
• Spoke at the IT4ALL Congress in Bilbao, Spain, 7 February 2003. Topic: "Nations, Regions, and the Law of the Internet."
• Spoke at the ICANN-Studienkreis in Berlin, 3-4 February 2003. Topics: Geolocation on the Internet; internationalized domain names; the future of the DNS namespace.
• Participated in RIPE 44, Amsterdam, 29-31 January 2003. Issues: IP address allocation policy; IXP practices.
• Co-organized the 2002 East Africa Internet Forum in Nairobi, Kenya, which featured technical workshops and a plenary session on IXPs.

Fall 2003 - Digital Democracy.

• Description: Over the past 15 years, digital information and communication networks have spread rapidly across the globe, bringing with them hopes for, and claims of, fundamental change in the dynamics of power and influence across a range of political, economic, social, and semiotic dimensions. With a global scope, this course will take a close look at the possibilities, achievements, and failures of digital technology to decentralize and democratize. Topics to be covered include political democracy (transparency and the rule of law; digital electronic voting and online elections; e-government and the provision of online government services; Internet-based campaigning and activism; the emergence of global digital constituencies and online protest movements; government efforts to control access to information); economic democracy (the "digital divide"; ICT development strategies; digital entrepreneurship; privatization and liberalization of communications infrastructure; network interconnection; new definitions of property rights and protections; open source vs. proprietary software); social democracy (education and e-learning; the formation of coherent political and other interest groups); and semiotic democracy (meaning the decentralization of the power to make cultural meaning, i.e., peer-to-peer file sharing, digital music, blogging and other personal publishing, network filtering and censorship).
• Led by Professor Nesson and Andrew McLaughlin, the course was taught collaboratively, colloquium-style, by a Berkman Center team of experts in Internet law, policy, technology, and development: Michael Best, Geoffrey Kirkman, Colin Maclay, James Moore, John Palfrey, and Ethan Zuckerman.
  
• Course work included a paper, participation in an online forum adjunct to the class, and several written assignments over the term.
• Syllabus.

Andrew's PGP public key.