Mason Cole is Internet Governance Advisor at Perkins Coie. For more than 20 years, Mason has participated in the work of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the industry’s governing body, including serving three terms as chair of the Registrar Stakeholder Group, a term as vice chair of the influential council of the Generic Names Support Organization (GNSO), and two terms as the GNSO’s liaison to more than 170 international governments. He now serves as chair of the Business Constituency.

A longstanding innovator and leader in the internet oversight community, Mason is the founding chair of the Healthy Domains Initiative, the Domain Name Association’s ambitious program of registry and registrar self-regulation. He also has contributed to the policy work of the Internet Infrastructure Coalition and Internet Commerce Association.

He also was vice president of communications and industry relations at Donuts Inc., a domain name registry, where he worked with company co-founders to secure 198 of the company’s now almost 250 top-level domain names and helped manage the company’s ICANN relationship. As company spokesperson, he established proof-of-concept for new domains with media coverage from CNN, The Wall Street Journal, Al-Jazeera and other worldwide outlets. Mason held a similar role with Oversee.net, where he fully supervised the company’s interactions with ICANN and other regulatory authorities. During his time with Oversee, he successfully prosecuted patent claims in the United States, Canada and China.

Mason was the founding publisher and editor of State of the Domain, the first-of-its-kind statistical analysis of domain name growth and trends.