Global Director of Public Policy & Government Affairs
Google

Andrew McLaughlin is Director of Global Public Policy and Government Affairs for Google Inc.  Core policy issues for Google include privacy and data protection, censorship and content regulation, innovation regulation (copyrights, patents, and trademarks), communications and media policy, antitrust and competition, spectrum reform, and the regulation of communications networks, standards, and technologies.

Andrew is a non-resident Senior Fellow at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. From 1999-2002, Andrew worked to launch and manage the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), serving as Vice President, Chief Policy Officer, and Chief Financial Officer.  ICANN is the Internet's technical coordinating organization, overseeing its systems of unique identifiers, such as domain names and IP addresses. 

From 2002-2003, Andrew taught at Harvard Law while working on Internet and telecom law reform projects in a number of developing countries, including Ghana, Mongolia, Kenya, Afghanistan, and South Africa.  He was a co-founder of CIPESA, a technology policy think-tank and advocacy center based at Makerere University in Uganda.  Since joining Google, Andrew has continued that work as a member of the Board of Directors of Bridges.org, an international non-profit organization based in Cape Town that promotes the effective use of information and communications technology in the developing world.

Andrew's undergraduate degree is from Yale University, where he majored in history, and his law degree is from Harvard Law School.  After a clerkship for Judge Gerald Heaney of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, Andrew started his legal career at Jenner & Block in Washington DC, where he focused on appellate litigation and constitutional law.  He was a member of the legal team that challenged the U.S. government's first Internet censorship law – the Communications Decency Act -- resulting in the Supreme Court's landmark 1997 Internet free speech ruling.  From 1997-98, Andrew served as counsel to the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee.

In 2000, Time named Andrew one of its Digital Dozen. In 2001, he was named a Global Leader for Tomorrow by the World Economic Forum. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Young Leaders Forum of the National Committee on US-China Relations