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CDT Names David Johnson as Senior Resident Fellow

Washington–The Center for Democracy and Technology today announced the appointment of David R. Johnson as its first Senior Resident Fellow. The one-year fellowship begins on May 1.

The Senior Resident Fellowship is a new program made possible with the support of the Markle Foundation. The program is designed to permit CDT to expand its capacity to deal with new policy challenges facing the Internet, to work with new constituencies and to find new ways to keep the Internet open, innovative and free.

Working with others at CDT, Johnson plans to engage a community of theorists, technologists, activists and the broader public to help:

  1. Articulate the core values that have made the Internet so empowering and valuable;
  2. Identify threats to those values and;
  3. Develop new ways for people to collaborate online to preserve and protect those values.

“We want to invite others to help develop a catalogue of the many new valuable social and economic activities the Internet makes possible,” Johnson said. “We will also invite collaborators to develop new ways to measure and communicate to the public and policy makers the extent to which the Internet has empowered diverse communities. Together, we will seek to find new ways to assess the overall ‘health’ of the Internet ecosystem.”

“David Johnson is a great choice for this position and work focused on the health and value of the net is timely and important,” said CDT President Leslie Harris.

CDT believes this is a critical moment to take these steps. The Internet has created new opportunities for people to collaborate on a global scale to achieve their diverse goals. The open architecture of the Internet, which has produced so much economic and social value, has also enabled wrongdoers to inflict harm. Many people, focusing only on those harms, propose solutions that might undermine that openness.

“We think the time is ripe to refocus on the positive impact of the Internet on all aspects of society – the ‘value proposition’ for preserving an open, innovative, and free Internet — and to work together to maximize its benefits and control any harms in ways that preserve its open and innovative core,” said CDT Chair Jerry Berman.

Johnson has written extensively regarding Internet governance and comes to CDT after teaching at the New York Law School Institute for Information Law and Policy. Before teaching at NYLS, Johnson was until 2002 a partner at the Washington law firm Wilmer, Cutler and Pickering. He helped launch the Aspen Institute Internet Policy Project and has served on the boards of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and One Web Day.