Dr Johnny Ryan (FRHistS) is the Director of Enforce, ICCL’s unit holding Big Tech to account under European law. He is the architect of class-action litigation and regulatory complaints against Google, Microsoft, and the online advertising industry across Europe, and has testified to the US Senate, the European Parliament, and the Irish Oireachtas on surveillance, data rights, and competition. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Open Markets Institute and at the Center for Journalism & Liberty. He was a senior executive online advertising, media, and technology industries. He is a globally recognised expert and scholar whose work and litigation has influenced digital law and policy in Europe and the United States. His commentary and regulatory interventions regularly feature in global media including The Guardian, The Economist, The New York Times, etc. He recently launched Ireland’s first ever class action.

Dr Ryan leads Enforce, the technology-accountability unit of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties. Enforce uses law to challenge how the largest technology companies surveil, profile, and direct attention. It pursues strategic litigation, regulatory complaints, original technical investigations, and the engineering of public-interest tools. He is the architect of multiple landmark cases and complaints.

He was Chief Policy Officer at Brave Software and Chief Innovation Officer at The Irish Times Group. His regulatory interventions and expert commentary appear in The New York Times, The Economist, The Guardian, Die Zeit, Wired, Le Monde, The Financial Times and other leading media.

Outside Ireland, Dr Ryan’s regulatory complaints and expert commentary appear in The New York Times, The Economist, The Guardian, Die Zeit, Wired, Le Monde, The Financial Times, Reuters, Bloomberg, Politico, and other leading outlets. Open Markets called him “a renowned global privacy expert”. Protocol named him “The thorn in Google’s side”. Tagesspiegel listed him as one of the digital people who shaped 2021. Die Zeit calls him “Google’s biggest headache”. He was awarded the EPIC International Champion of Privacy Award 2023.

He has testified at the United States Senate, the International Grand Committee on Disinformation, the European Parliament (most recently at the cross-party Democratic Tech Alliance in September 2025), and the Irish Oireachtas. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and serves on the EPIC advisory board.

Earlier in his career he was Chief Policy Officer at Brave Software and Chief Innovation Officer at The Irish Times Group. His first book was the most cited source in the European Commission’s impact assessment that decided against pursuing Web censorship across the EU. His second book is A History of the Internet and the Digital Future.

He has a PhD from the University of Cambridge thanks to a scholarship from the O’Reilly Foundation. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and member of the EPIC advisory board. He is also currently a Senior Fellow at the Open Markets Institute.

He started his career in design, and was 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.