Practice history

Preston is a technology lawyer with Byrne & Storm, P.C., and a Senior Fellow of the Adam Smith Institute in London.

Preston is the architect of the GRANITE Act and the Adam Smith Institute’s Freedom of Speech Bill, an effort to launch a coordinated transatlantic legislative response to foreign censorship enforcement. He was appointed to the Legal Advisory Council of the UK’s Free Speech Union in 2025.

If your company has been targeted by a foreign censorship agency, Preston has been doing this work for nearly a decade. For that, or for any other business legal problem for that matter, get in touch. For media or professional inquiries, contact Preston via this contact form or on LinkedIn.

Commercial work

About half of Preston’s practice consists of FinTech compliance and product counsel work. This includes a wide range of commercial legal advice building and fixing compliance systems, product design, data privacy, investigations, litigation strategy, law enforcement requests, board reporting, and corporate governance. Preston also has experience managing commercial disputes, including cross-border commercial litigation and international arbitration.

Preston represents companies with issues at the technological frontier. Clients include companies focused on social media, crypto, and AI.

Digital rights work

The other half of Preston’s practice sits at the intersection of the First Amendment and the sprawling global regulatory apparatus that foreign governments have built to circumvent it, focusing on social media and related platform regulation.

This work is primarily concerned with defending the constitutional rights of American Internet companies and their users from foreign regulatory intrusions. It includes commercial advice, international regulatory advice, and disputes.

Preston has served as counsel in numerous cross-border freedom of expression matters, most notably as a member of the legal team in Granath v. Wright in 2019 and as lead counsel in 4chan Community Support LLC and Lolcow LLC v. UK Office of Communications in 2025, both pro bono. Both cases have been the subject of extensive international media coverage.

In 2025, Preston aggressively defended every American target of formal enforcement proceedings from UK Internet censorship agency Ofcom, which has issued 197 separate investigative demands to US-based companies without using a single diplomatic or treaty channel. This work has been done entirely on a pro bono publico basis, free of charge.

Preston’s clients are, to date, the only American companies publicly known, in the lawful exercise of their constitutional rights, to have refused those demands. Ofcom’s success rate in compelling Preston’s American clients’ obedience to the UK’s speech regulatory regime is 0%.

The result of Preston’s clients’ dogged resistance to foreign censorship enforcement on American soil is (1) a case that leading transatlantic law firms describe as a “landmark moment in the debate over who governs the Internet,” (2) increased awareness of the foreign censorship problem across the United States, and (3) active movement on law reform proposals that continue to reshape policy debate on both sides of the Atlantic.

In the United States, that legislative movement includes the GRANITE Act, a foreign censorship shield law Preston conceived in October 2025 that went from a blog post, to passing a chamber of the Wyoming state house, to State Department confirmation of federal consideration in under four months. The Wyoming GRANITE Act, introduced last-minute in January, passed the Wyoming House of Representatives 46-12 in February 2026 during a short budget session, has been taken up as a committee bill in the interim and will be back aiming at full passage in the general session in early 2027. State GRANITE efforts are underway in several other states. Senator Eric Schmitt has vowed to introduce a GRANITE-style shield bill in the US Senate, and the US House of Representatives is reportedly considering its own companion legislation. The GRANITE Act proposal would allow Americans to sue foreign sovereigns in American courts for substantial damages awards if they are victimized by foreign censorship enforcement attempts.

In the United Kingdom, Preston was appointed to the Legal Advisory Council of the UK Free Speech Union in 2025. Preston was also lead co-author of the Adam Smith Institute’s Freedom of Speech Bill 2026, model legislation designed to replicate the First Amendment’s legal protections within the UK’s constitutional system, published in April 2026. This fully-formed Model Bill is derived from an earlier policy paper and Article 10-style prototype enacting statute Preston proposed in 2020. The Model Bill has generated immediate parliamentary engagement, described by one sitting member of the House of Lords as a “fantastic contribution to this discussion [that] has already created a lively debate that hopefully adds to re-energising the growing campaign to make speech less strangled by law” and described by another as “extremely good.”

Preston’s free speech work spans nearly a decade of defending US technology companies against domestic and foreign censorship. Preston has represented Americans against attempts to censor or chill constitutionally protected speech online by public bodies acting under the authority of numerous countries and international organizations, including the United States, the UK, France, Germany, the European Union, Russia, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and Brazil.

Prior work

Earlier in Preston’s career he worked as a securitization lawyer in BigLaw in London. Preston co-founded and served as COO and General Counsel of Monax Industries, an early enterprise blockchain company that forked Ethereum in 2014 to build the first Ethereum DAO prototype and the first permissioned blockchain client — work that evolved into Apache-licensed Hyperledger Burrow, the Hyperledger Project’s first Ethereum Virtual Machine, subsequently used by Intel and IBM.

Preston has taught cryptocurrency and tech law at Fordham Law School and Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University.

Bar admissions

England and Wales (Solicitor)

Connecticut

New York

District of Columbia

United States District Court for the District of Columbia

Education

Academic background

M.A. (Hons) International Relations, University of St Andrews, Fife, Scotland

CPE/GDL, LPC, LL.B., English Law, College of Law of England and Wales, London, England

LL.M., U.S. Law, University of Connecticut School of Law, Hartford, CT, USA

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Copyright Preston Byrne 2012-2026, licensed liberally to you under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.