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Senior Fellow at the Berkman Center, Harvard Law School
Joined on November 7, 2003
Total Post Views: 74,969
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Andrew is currently a Senior Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, where his work focuses on the law and regulation of Internet and telecommunications networks. In recent years, he has worked primarily in developing countries. 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 is co-teaching 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. He continues to serve as Senior Adviser to ICANN, working on policy development, organizational reform, and institutional relationships. He is a member of the ICANN committee on deployment of internationalized domain names.
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.
Except where otherwise noted, all postings by Andrew McLaughlin on CircleID are licensed under a Creative Commons License.
In the second part of this two-part series article (part one here), Andrew McLaughlin concludes his critical look at the recently reported study, Public Participation in ICANN, by John Palfrey, Clifford Chen, Sam Hwang, and Noah Eisenkraft at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School... "ICANN has never attempted to be -- and was never designed to be -- 'representative' of the worldwide Internet community in any mathematically precise way. In view of the vast size of the global population of Internet users, and the specialized technical focus of ICANN's policy-making responsibilities, it would be a hopeless task to try to achieve truly representative statistical proportionality among ICANN's participants, committees, task forces, or Board members. Rather, here's how the U.S. government's foundational 1998 DNS policy statement described the core principle of 'representation'." more
In this two-part series article, Andrew McLaughlin takes a critical look at the recently reported study, Public Participation in ICANN, by John Palfrey, Clifford Chen, Sam Hwang, and Noah Eisenkraft at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School..."The study's presentation and analysis of data contain much of interest, and much that could assist ICANN (and other policy-making bodies) in improving its use and management of online public forums. But the study's value is diminished by two rather fundamental shortcomings: (1) its misapprehension of both the theory and the practice of ICANN's policy-development process, and (2) the sizeable gap between the broad scope of the study's conclusions and the very narrow -- indeed, myopic -- focus of the analysis from which they are derived. Simply put, the study scrutinizes a small and misleading corner of ICANN (namely, its online public comment forums) and leaps to a sweeping (and, in my view, unwarranted) conclusion." more
Here's a good way to frighten yourself: Learn about something, and then read what the press writes about it. It's astonishing how often flatly untrue things get reported as facts. I first observed this back in 1997 when I was a Democratic lawyer in the U.S. House of Representatives working on the (rather ridiculous) campaign finance investigation. (The investigating committee's conspiracy-minded chairman was famous for shotgunning pumpkins in his backyard in order to figure out exactly how Hillary snuffed Vince Foster)...More recently, I've seen the same discouraging phenomenon in reporting on technology and, in particular, the Internet. more
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