I am the managing partner of Byrne & Storm, P.C.
For nearly two decades, I have worked at the intersection of international regulation and emerging technologies, as a founder, attorney, think tank fellow, law professor, and executive.
In my free time I’m a Senior Fellow of the Adam Smith Institute where, lately, my research interests have focused on free speech and related technology regulation. I am also on the Legal Advisory Council of the UK Free Speech Union.
My free speech work includes defending numerous U.S. technology companies from domestic and foreign censorship for nearly a decade. Recently this includes quarterbacking the defense, pro bono, of every American enforcement target of the UK Online Safety Act in 2025.
As part of this defense work, I also created the GRANITE Act foreign Internet censorship shield law concept designed to solve the American technology industry’s current struggles with overseas Internet regulators and censors. Efforts to enact GRANITE-style shields are moving under their own power in multiple states and at the federal level:
- The Wyoming GRANITE Act, a bill modeled after my initial proposal drafted by Colin Crossman, Representative Daniel Singh, and me, was formally introduced with bill number HB 70 in the Wyoming House of Representatives on January 30th, 2026. It sailed through an introduction vote 57 to 5 on February 10th. It is the first foreign censorship shield bill ever to be introduced.
- Because this is a short session, if Wyoming GRANITE does make it through a floor vote, that process will be done and dusted by March 1st.
- West Virginia introduced the West Virginia GRANITE Act, SB 923, derived from the Wyoming bill, on February 12th.
- The New Hampshire GRANITE Act effort, which is also working from Wyoming GRANITE’s text, is active. The bill is likely to be introduced in the current 2026 session as an amendment to an existing bill, HB 1776.
- A Delaware team is working on a Delaware version of the GRANITE Act.
- The U.S. House of Representatives is reportedly considering introducing a federal version of the GRANITE Act.
- Senator Eric Schmitt has vowed to introduce a shield bill in the U.S. Senate.
It’s a very fluid situation, frequent updates on which I provide on my blog.
I’ve taught cryptocurrency law at Fordham Law School in NYC and Antonin Scalia Law School at GMU in DC, although I’m currently taking a break from teaching to focus on work. Previously, I worked as a securitization lawyer in BigLaw in London, England.
Earlier in my career, I co-founded and was COO and general counsel of early enterprise blockchain startup, Monax Industries. Monax forked Ethereum proof-of-concept version 3 to build the first Ethereum DAO prototype and the first permissioned blockchain client, in both cases in 2014. The design later evolved into the Apache-licensed Hyperledger Burrow permissioned Ethereum blockchain node. Burrow was the Hyperledger Project’s first Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), and was used by Intel and IBM’s contributions to that project, respectively named Sawtooth Lake and Fabric, to run EVMs on those codebases.
This here is my website and blog. I’m a pretty big fan of marmots, too, so don’t be surprised if you see one of those appearing in a blog post from time to time.
For media or professional inquiries, I can be reached via contact form or on LinkedIn.