Contributors
Daniel O’Connor
Senior Director, Public Policy & Government Affairs at CCIA
Dan O’Connor is the Senior Director for Public Policy & Government Affairs at the Computer & Communications Industry Association, where he works with government and industry leaders on competition, intellectual property, international trade and global Internet policy.
He also leads CCIA’s efforts on antitrust policy and monitors the business and technological developments in high-tech markets. He has worked on public policy, government relations and media outreach for several high-profile antitrust cases in both the United States and Europe. Before assuming his current position he was Director of Competition & Telecommunications Policy and the Deputy Director of Government Affairs at CCIA. Before joining CCIA, he served as a Legislative Aide in the New York State Assembly for the Chairwoman of the State-Federal Relations Committee.
Mr. O’Connor received a Master’s Degree in International Political Economy from the London School of Economics, where he attained high-merit on his dissertation on the framing of Internet censorship as a barrier to trade. He received a B.S. in Policy Analysis and Management with a concentration in Consumer Economics from Cornell University where he was a Dean’s Scholar.
In his free time, he also enjoys playing rugby (where he frequently “breaks” his own “stuff”), traveling and politics.
Matthew Schruers
Vice President, Law & Policy at CCIA
Matthew Schruers is Vice President for Law & Policy at the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA), where he represents and advises the association on domestic and international policy issues including intellectual property, competition, and trade. He is also an adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Law Center and the Georgetown Graduate School Program on Communication, Culture, and Technology (CCT), where he teaches courses on intellectual property.
Mr. Schruers joined CCIA from Morrison & Foerster LLP in 2005, where he practiced intellectual property, antitrust, and administrative law. Mr. Schruers received his J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law, where he served on the editorial board of the Virginia Law Review, and received his B.A. from Duke University.
Joshua Lamel
Executive Director at FIIF & VP at CCIA
Joshua Lamel is the Executive Director of the Foundation for Innovation and Internet Freedom and a Vice President at CCIA. He has dedicated his career to being a passionate advocate for Internet Freedom and ensuring competitive technology and telecom markets.
Josh was an early DC advocate for technologies that were breaking stuff, working with early VoIP and telecom startups in trying to create a regulatory environment that would allow these companies to thrive. From there, Josh moved on to become counsel for Senator Ron Wyden, where he led efforts to ensure a free and open Internet for one of the Internet’s leading voices in Congress. While with Senator Wyden he helped to lead efforts preventing passage of the anti-disrupter telecom reform proposals in 2005-6 and authored the first bill and the framework for all subsequent legislation on net neutrality. Additionally, when broadcasters and music copyright holders came after and tried to destroy the nascent Internet radio industry, and almost succeeded, Josh led Senator Wyden’s successful effort to prevent oppressive copyright royalty rates from destroying the industry.
After leaving Senator Wyden’s office, Josh continued efforts to enable a robust environment for disrupters. This included becoming a tireless advocate for more ubiquitous and ultra-fast broadband, working with the technology industry and public interest groups in pushing for a balanced copyright regime and leading efforts to continue the symbiotic relationship between the U.S. government, universities, laboratories and the high tech industry in ensuring a pro-innovation tech transfer and funding environment.
Ross Schulman
Public Policy and Regulatory Counsel at CCIA
Ross Schulman is Public Policy and Regulatory Counsel at the Computer and Communications Industry Association. He was previously with the Center for Democracy and Technology as a program manager handling consumer privacy and information security issues. While there he managed the Anti-Spyware Coalition in developing industry standard definitions and best practices for consumer and business computer security. In the course of eight years living in Washington DC, he has also spent time working in both the Senate, for Senator Ron Wyden and the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the House of Representatives for the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
He received his J.D. magna cum laude from American University and his bachelors degree in computer science from Brandeis University.
Glenn Manishin
Partner, Troutman Sanders and DisCo’s Senior Legal Analyst
Glenn Manishin serves as outside counsel to and is the senior legal analyst for Project DisCo; he has represented the Computer & Communications Industry Assn. for more than 20 years. A partner with the Troutman Sanders law firm in Washington, DC, Glenn’s core competence is antitrust law, although he has worked with a veritable who’s who of leading IT industry firms since 1990 on intellectual property, telecommunications, technology policy, privacy and related Internet-centric issues. Glenn’s claim to fame is that he is the only lawyer to have appeared as attorney-of-record in the two largest U.S. monopolization cases of the past generation — United States v. AT&T Co. and United States v. Microsoft Corp. — in the latter of which he was co-counsel along with former federal appeals Judges Robert Bork and Ken Starr.
Glenn received his J.D. degree from Columbia Law School, where he as a Harlan Fiske Stone scholar and editor of the Columbia Law Review, and a B.A. in economics from Brandeis University.
Glenn is a true Web pioneer, having built and launched one of the first ten law firm Web sites in 1995, and remains a prolific blogger at his Fear & Loathing personal blog, LexDigerati legal blawg and his Formula One Art & Genius grand prix racing site. Glenn’s personal motto, borrowed from John Lennon, is that “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.” Carpe diem!
Brian Kahin
Senior Fellow at CCIA & fellow at the MIT Sloan Center for Digital Business
Brian Kahin is Senior Fellow at the Computer & Communications Industry Association and Fellow at the MIT Sloan School’s Center for Digital Business. He was recently Innovation Policy Fellow in residence at OECD’s Directorate for Science, Technology and Industry.
Kahin was founding Director of the Harvard Information Infrastructure Project (1989-1997), the first university-based program to address the social, economic, and policy implications of the Internet.
In 1997, Kahin was appointed Senior Policy Analyst at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, where he was responsible for intellectual property, Internet policy, and electronic commerce. As part of the Administration’s task force on global electronic commerce, he initiated the interagency Working Group on the Digital Economy on behalf of the National Economic Council. He also served as Vice Chair of the OECD Working Party on the Information Economy, chaired the interagency working group on domain names, co-chaired the administration’s working group on database protection, initiated studies on patent quality and standards policy at OSTP’s Science and Technology Policy Institute.
After leaving the government in 2000, he became resident fellow at the Internet Policy Institute in Washington and a visiting scholar at the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy (University of California, Berkeley). He was then founding Director of the Center for Information Policy and Visiting Professor in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland. He subsequently taught at the University of Michigan as a Visiting Professor with joint appointments in the School of Information, the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, and the Department of Communication Studies, while also serving as an advisor to the Provost’s Office. He became senior fellow at CCIA in 2005, while remaining affiliated with the Michigan School of Information.
Kahin has served on the boards of European Policy for Intellectual Property (EPIP), the Public Patent Foundation, and the Telecommunications Policy Research Conference. He served on the Association of American Universities Task Force on a National Strategy for Managing Scientific and Technical Information and the U.S. State Department’s Advisory Committee on International Communications and Information Policy, chairing the Committee’s Working Group on Intellectual Property, Interoperability and Standards. He has also served on the editorial advisory boards of the Boston University Journal of Science & Technology Law and Cyberspace Lawyer, the advisory board of the Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities, and the steering committee for the Software Patent Institute.
Ali Sternburg
Public Policy and Regulatory Counsel at CCIA
Ali Sternburg is Public Policy & Regulatory Counsel at the Computer & Communications Industry Association. After initially joining as a Legal Fellow in June 2011, she focuses on online copyright issues and other areas of intellectual property policy. She received her J.D. in 2012 from American University Washington College of Law, where she was a Student Attorney in the Glushko-Samuelson Intellectual Property Law Clinic, President of the Intellectual Property Law Society, Senior Symposium Chair and Senior Marketing Manager for the Intellectual Property Brief, and a Dean’s Fellow at the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property. She graduated from Harvard College in 2009 where she studied Government and Music, wrote her senior honors thesis on “Theoretical and Legal Views on U.S. Government Involvement in Musical Creativity Online,” and interned at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.
Ali sings mashups and transformative covers and shares them under Creative Commons licenses for free download on her SoundCloud page, to contribute to the progress of science and the useful arts.
Rob Pegoraro
Tech Policy Contributor
Rob Pegoraro tries to make sense of computers, consumer electronics, telecom services, the Internet, software, digital culture–and all of the things that can get in their way.
Not long after receiving a bachelor’s degree in international relations from Georgetown University (as in, zero academic credentials to write about technology), he began writing the occasional story about video games or online services for the Washington Post. One piece led to another, and eventually to a 12-year stint as the paper’s consumer-tech columnist that also saw him write for almost every section of the Post and appear on the front page all of three times.
Since 2011, Pegoraro has covered the digital landscape as a freelance contributor to Discovery News, USA Today, the Consumer Electronics Association and other online and print outlets. He has met most of the authors of the Internet, attended CES fifteen years in a row and may be the only person to have written for both Reader’s Digest and Boing Boing.
