Our People » Johnny Ryan
Johnny Ryan brings his experience in surveillance, data rights, privacy, and competition and antitrust to his role as a fellow for the Open Markets Institute. He also serves on the Center for Journalism & Liberty’s Trans-Atlantic Advisory Board. Currently a senior fellow at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, he is former chief policy & industry relations officer at Brave, the private web browser. Ryan led Brave’s campaign for enforcement of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, and liaised with government and industry colleagues globally. His regulatory interventions and expert commentary have appeared in The New York Times, The Economist, Wired, Le Monde and Financial Times. Protocol profiled him. Previously, Ryan worked in ad tech, media, and policy, including stints as chief innovation officer of The Irish Times and senior researcher at the Institute of International & European Affairs. Ryan is a regular speaker at high-level industry fora, and has testified in the United States Senate and the European Commission. As an O’Reilly Foundation doctoral scholar at the University of Cambridge, he studied the spread of militant memes. Ryan is the author of two books, including A History of the Internet and the Digital Future. He remains a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and is a member of the World Economic Forum’s expert network on media, entertainment, and information. He started his career in design, and returned to design thinking later as executive director of the Innovation Academy at University College Dublin. He was an associate on the emerging digital environment at the Judge Business School of the University of Cambridge.
See his Irish Council for Civil Liberties bio.
Open Markets Senior Fellow Johnny Ryan is quoted in The Irish Times applauding the European Commission’s investigation into Twitter’s online safety and disinformation failures, while urging the Commission to go further to address toxic algorithms.