My Backstory
About Dave Phillips -Â
My professional Internet journey ran from the mid-90s with AOL and Bertelsmann,  to Napster and IGN/Fox in the first part of last decade, to Naturalpath/SAY Media and Sidecar Technologies in the last five years.
My personal backstory started in the Washington DC area where politics and policy were staples of family dinner conversation along with the Redskins. After getting a taste of California and Constitutional law as an undergraduate at Pomona College, I headed to law school at the University of Chicago, where like many of my classmates I became mesmerized by my first year Elements of Law class taught by Cass Sunstein who explored the myriad of economic, social and behavioral issues that drive the law. (Professor Sunstein later became Obama’s chief regulatory policy czar and author of two bestselling books on regulatory policy and behavioral economics).
After law school, I joined DC law firm of Hogan and Hartson (now Hogan, Lovells) and became an associate attorney in the international trade and technology regulatory group working under giants like Sandy Berger (Clinton National Security Advisor) and Chief Justice John Roberts.
The siren sounds of technology led me out of this secure career path and I found myself getting interested in the Internet (thank you Cap Access) and then landed at America Onlinein 1994 as AOL’s second lawyer. That fortunate turn gave me ground level view on a wide array of Internet legal and policy issues – from privacy and government surveillance to copyright, free-speech and the clash of national laws. In 1997, I left the safe confines of AOL’s Northern VA headquarters to become the General Counsel of AOL Europe (JV with Bertelsmann). While Europe was comparatively behind the US in Internet adoption when I first arrived, it soon became clear that the Internet wave would not be confined to any particular national border or culture.
AOL’s acquisition and post-merger integration Netscape and CompuServe in 1999 gave me an opportunity to transition from the chief lawyer in Europe to AOL’s chief operating executive in the UK, just as Free ISPs disrupted AOL UK’s business model before AOL’s disastrous marriage with Time Warner in 2000.
