Chris Riley
Disruptive internet policy engineer, beverage connoisseur, gregarious introvert, contrarian order Muppet, persistent optimist (somehow!), and proud husband & father. Not in order.Executive Director, Data Transfer Initiative; and Distinguished Research Fellow, Annenberg Public Policy Center, University of Pennsylvania. Formerly: R Street Institute (senior fellow, internet governance); Brave New Software (executive director); Mozilla (director, public policy); U.S. State Department (program manager, internet freedom team); Free Press (policy counsel); FCC (honors program attorney/advisor); American University School of International Service (adjunct professor); and JHU Computer Science (instructor). BS, Computer Science, Wheeling Jesuit University; PhD, Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University; JD, Yale Law School.I'm writing a book! It's a serialized nonfiction, nonacademic book about consciousness, in which I offer a novel theory. To me, consciousness can be interpreted as a combination of 1) abstraction and 2) resilience. I believe this framework gives us a way of thinking about AI and when/how it might reach a point of legitimate moral salience. I'm posting the chapters one at a time on Medium, as they are ready. Here's the introduction.Selected recent work:
We Need to Control Personal AI Data So Personal AI Cannot Control Us (2025)
How Generative AI and Data Portability Could Help Save Democracy (2024)
Past, Present, Future: AI, Geopolitics, and the Global Economy (2023)
The Delegation series, from Delegation, or, the Twenty Nine Words That the Internet Forgot to Contending for Democracy on Social Media and Beyond with Richard Reisman (2022)
Modularity for International Internet Governance and A Module Playbook for Platform-to-Researcher Data Access with Susan Ness (2022)
In Defense of the Global, Open Internet with Jason Pielemeier (2022)
C-SPAN on Facebook Papers (Video)
Pragmatic Principles for Content Policy and Governance (2021) - and the bonus Fifth Principle
The Great War blog series (2021)
Sample interoperability articles: CPI (with James Vasile) (2021), JCP (2020), Mozilla working paper (2019)
CATS (2017-18) - Competition, AI/Algorithms, Tracking, Speech - and the successor post, The future of tech policy involves CATS–and they will be SAD. (2022)