Mike Godwin

Michael Wayne Godwin is an American attorney and author. He was the first staff counsel of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and he created the Internet adage Godwin's law and the notion of an Internet meme. From July 2007 to October 2010, he was general counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation. In March 2011, he was elected to the Open Source Initiative board. Godwin has been a contributing editor of Reason magazine since 1994. In April 2019, he was elected to the Internet Society board. From 2015 to 2020, he was general counsel and director of innovation policy at the R Street Institute. In August 2020, he and the Blackstone Law Group filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration on behalf of the employees of TikTok, where he went on to work from June 2021 until June 2022. Since October 2022, he has worked as the policy and privacy lead at Anonym, a "privacy-safe advertising" startup.

Early life and education Godwin attended Lamar High School in Houston,

Career Godwin's early involvement in the Steve Jackson Games affair led to his being hired by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in November 1990, when the organization was new. Shortly afterwards, as the first EFF in-house lawyer, he supervised its sponsorship of the Steve Jackson Games, Inc. v. United States Secret Service case. Steve Jackson Games won the case in 1993.

Godwin has also been a staff attorney and policy fellow for the Center for Democracy and Technology; a chief correspondent at IP Worldwide, a publication of American Lawyer Media; and a columnist for The American Lawyer magazine. He is a contributing editor at Reason magazine, until October 22, 2010. Commenting on the self-correcting nature of Wikipedia in an interview with The New York Times in which he said that he had corrected his own Wikipedia article, Godwin said: "The best answer for bad speech is more speech." in response, denying the demand and describing the FBI's interpretation of the law as "idiosyncratic ... and, more importantly, incorrect."

Godwin has been a proponent of net neutrality since 2006, along with other internet advocates such as Vint Cerf. When the Wikimedia Foundation agreed with major telecommunications providers to create Wikipedia Zero, an application that violated the principles of net neutrality, Godwin believed that the benefits of the program outweighed its negatives. Wikipedia Zero was discontinued in 2018.

Godwin was named a member of the Student Press Law Center Board of Directors in January 2009, and the Internet Society Board of Trustees in April 2019.

In August 2020, he and the Blackstone Law Group filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration on behalf of the employees of the media company TikTok. In June 2021, Godwin took a role as director in trust & safety at TikTok. In October 2022, he began working at Anonym as the trust and safety lead. He has since made it clear that, in his opinion, the alt-right, especially the participants in the 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right rally, deserve comparisons to the Nazis. He has also stated in the press several times, from 2015 to 2023, that informed comparison of U.S. president Donald Trump to Hitler could be valid.

Personal life In 2017, Godwin married Sienghom Ches. They met while Godwin was on a business trip in Cambodia.