About the IAPP

Dr Johnny Ryan FRHistS is the Chief Policy & Industry Relations Officer at Brave.



He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and a member of the World Economic Forum’s expert network on media, entertainment and information.



His second book “A History of the Internet and the Digital Future” is on the reading list at Harvard and Stanford. His expert commentary on adblocking, privacy, and digital has appeared in The Financial Times, Le Monde, Wired, NPR, Advertising Age, the BBC, Sky News, and many others. His writing has appeared in NATO Review, Fortune, Business Week, Business Insider, Contagious, and Ars Technica.



He has a background in policy think tanks, academia, and media. His previous roles include being Chief Innovation Officer of The Irish Times, Senior Researcher at the Institute of International & European Affairs (IIEA).



He has spoken at the United Nations, Chatham House, the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge, the OSCE, the European Commission, the Academy of European Law.



His first book, based on his work at the IIEA, was the most cited source in the European Commission’s impact assessment that decided against pursuing Web censorship across the European Union.



As a PhD scholar at the University of Cambridge he studied the spread of terrorist memes on the Web. He was supervised by MI5’s official historian, and his advisor was the former Director of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6).



He started his career as a designer, 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, and occasionally lectures at the Business School of University College Dublin.