Mike Godwin

Mike Godwin

Member Board Of Trustees at Internet Society
Joined on January 14, 2020
Total Post Views: 17,310

About

Mike Godwin is an American attorney and author. He focuses his research and writing on the areas of patent and copyright reform, surveillance reform, technology policy, freedom of expression and global internet policy. He currently serves as a member of the Board of Trustees of the Internet Society and is a distinguished senior fellow at the R Street Institute.

He previously served as a senior policy advisor at Internews, advising the organization’s public-policy partners in developing and transitional democracies as part of the Global Internet Policy Project.

Mike also served as general counsel for the California-based Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia and other collaborative projects. There, he created and directed anti-censorship, privacy, trademark and copyright strategies and policies, and he provided legal and strategic support to Wikipedia’s responses to the SOPA and PIPA initiatives.

Prior to that, Godwin was the first staff counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which he advised on a range of legal issues centered on freedom of expression and privacy rights during the accelerating growth of Internet access in the United States.

Early in his career, he served as a reporter and later editor-in-chief of The Daily Texan. He is also a contributing editor at Reason magazine and is the originator of the widely cited “Godwin’s Law of Nazi Analogies,” which, in 2012, was added to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Except where otherwise noted, all postings by Mike Godwin on CircleID are licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Featured Blogs

Looking Forward to ‘The Conversation We Should Be Having’

No, this topic hasn't yet been exhausted: There's still plenty more conversation we can and should have about the proposed sale of the .ORG registry operator to a private firm. Ideally, that conversation will add more information and more clarity about the issues at stake and the facts that underpin those issues. That's why I'm planning to attend today's event at American University where the sale's proponents, opponents and undecideds will have a tremendous opportunity to better understand one another. more

Here’s How We Can Truly #SaveDotOrg

Many of my friends in the civil-liberties and Internet-law communities have been criticizing the Internet Society's agreement to sell the Public Interest Registry, which administers the .ORG top-level domain. I'm a free-speech guy, so I support their right to raise all these criticisms. But they often ask me directly – knowing that my track record as an Internet civil-libertarian is longer than most – why as a member of the Internet Society (a.k.a. ISOC) board I decided to join the board's unanimous approval of the deal. more

Topic Interests

Domain NamesInternet GovernanceRegistry ServicesICANNPolicy & Regulation

Recent Comments

Here's How We Can Truly #SaveDotOrg
Here's How We Can Truly #SaveDotOrg
Here's How We Can Truly #SaveDotOrg
Here's How We Can Truly #SaveDotOrg
Here's How We Can Truly #SaveDotOrg

Popular Posts

Here’s How We Can Truly #SaveDotOrg

Looking Forward to ‘The Conversation We Should Be Having’