Speaker Biographies

Alan Davidson is Google’s Washington policy counsel and head of its Washington, D.C., government affairs office. Prior to joining Google, Mr. Davidson was associate director of the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), a public interest group promoting civil liberties and human rights online. He led CDT's free expression, Internet governance, and digital copyright projects, and testified before Congress on these issues. Mr. Davidson has written and spoken widely on privacy, free speech, encryption, and copyright online. He is also an adjunct professor at Georgetown University's program in Communications, Culture, and Technology, teaching a graduate seminar on Internet architecture and public policy. In 2004 he was a visiting scholar in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Program in Science, Technology, and Society. He has also worked as a senior consultant at Booz-Allen & Hamilton, where he designed information systems for NASA's Space Station Freedom project, at the U.S. Congress Office of Technology Assessment, and at the White House, where he worked on technology and policy issues

Jack Goldsmith III is a visiting scholar at AEI and a professor at Harvard Law School. Professor Goldsmith previously served for two years in the Bush administration, first as special counsel to the general counsel of the Department of Defense and then as an assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice. Mr. Goldsmith has held faculty positions at the University of Virginia School of Law and the University of Chicago Law School, and practiced law privately as an associate at Covington & Burling. Prior to these positions, Mr. Goldsmith clerked for Justice Anthony M. Kennedy of the U.S. Supreme Court and Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, and served as a legal assistant to Judge George Aldrich on the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal in the Netherlands. At AEI, Mr. Goldsmith studies international law, sovereignty, and intelligence reform. In addition to Who Controls the Internet? Mr. Goldsmith is coauthor, with Eric Posner, of The Limits of International Law (Oxford University Press, 2005).

Ambassador David A. Gross has served since August 2001 as the U.S. coordinator for international communications and information policy in the Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs at the Department of State. He previously worked on the 2000 Bush-Cheney presidential campaign in 2000 as the national executive director of Lawyers for Bush-Cheney. He also worked at the law firm of Sutherland, Asbill & Brennan, where he became a partner specializing in communications and telecommunications issues. He served as Washington counsel for AirTouch Communications, which at the time was the world's largest wireless telecommunications company, with extensive interests in the United States, Europe, Asia, and elsewhere. Since joining the Department of State, Ambassador Gross has addressed the United Nations (UN) General Assembly and has led U.S. delegations to many major international telecommunications conferences. He spearheaded the U.S. government's participation in the multilateral preparatory work for both phases of the UN's "heads of state" World Summit on the Information Society, and led the U.S. delegations to both the formal Summits in Geneva in 2003 and in Tunis in 2005. Ambassador Gross has been a member of the UN Information and Communications Technologies Task Force, and has also led interagency telecommunications delegations to many countries, conducted bilateral discussions at senior levels with representatives from more than seventy countries, and provided commercial and policy advocacy on behalf of U.S. companies in markets around the world.

Sebastian Mallaby is a Washington Post columnist and a member of the paper’s editorial board. His interests cover a wide variety of domestic and international issues, including globalization, trade, investment trends, international development, and economic policy. He was a 2004 Pulitzer Prize finalist for editorial writing. Mr. Mallaby spent 2003 as a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he wrote a history of the World Bank under James Wolfensohn entitled The World’s Banker (Penguin Press, 2004). The book was named as an “Editor’s Choice” by the New York Times and became a Washington Post bestseller. Mr. Mallaby joined the Post in 1999 after thirteen years with The Economist newspaper of London. While at The Economist, Mallaby worked in London, where he wrote about international finance; in Africa, where he covered Nelson Mandela’s release and the collapse of apartheid; and in Japan, where he covered the breakdown of the country’s political and economic consensus. Between 1997 and 1999 Mallaby was The Economist’s Washington bureau chief and wrote the magazine’s weekly Lexington column on American politics and foreign policy. Mallaby has also contributed to numerous other publications, including Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Prospect, The National Interest, the New York Times, Policy Review, Slate, and The New Republic, and he is the author of After Apartheid: The Future of South Africa (Crown, 1992).

Tim Wu is a professor at Columbia Law School, specializing in telecommunications law, copyright, and international trade. He has previously taught at the University of Virginia School of Law, the University of Chicago Law School, and Stanford Law School. He has served as director of corporate marketing strategy at Riverstone Networks in Silicon Valley, and was a law clerk for Judge Richard Posner and Justice Stephen Breyer. He also worked in the Office of Legal Council at the Department of Justice. In addition to Who Controls the Internet? Mr. Wu’s publications include "The Copyright Paradox," in the 2005 Supreme Court Review; "Intellectual Property, Innovation, and Decision Architectures," in the Virginia Law Review (2005); "The International Privacy Regime," in Securing Privacy in the Internet Age (Radin & Chander, eds., Stanford University Press 2005); and "Cyberspace Sovereignty?—The Internet and the International System," in the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology (1997). Professor Wu is also a regular contributor to Slate magazine. He is on the advisory board of Public Knowledge and a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

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