Wendy Seltzer

June 23, 2026 Matthew Kovacev
ix
Source: Wikimedia Commons | https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wendy_Seltzer_%283%29.jpg

Summary

Wendy Seltzer is a lawyer and technologist, currently consulting through the Law Office of Wendy Seltzer.

As Principal Identity Architect at Tucows, she helped to found the Arya Association for interoperable trust and identity recognition. She previously served as Strategy Lead and Counsel to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at MIT, improving the Web’s security, availability, and interoperability through standards. As a Fellow with Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Wendy founded the Lumen Project (formerly Chilling Effects Clearinghouse), the web’s pioneering transparency report to measure the impact of legal takedown demands online. Wendy co-authored the second edition of Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion. She seeks to improve technology policy in support of user-driven innovation and secure communication.

Source: IETF Datatracker

About

Web Links

Videos

Tales of Internet Governance, Standards and Law – Wendy Seltzer, Summit on Human Agency

April 10, 2026 (12:58)
By: H2H Events

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0cme9_zPIw

Napa Valley. February 23, 2026

As one of the most influential lawyers of the internet age, Wendy Seltzer has been at the addressing the biggest questions around policy, human rights and the law as they relate to our digital lives.

In a fireside chat with Daniela Barbosa, the executive director of Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust, Seltzer reflects on her work in legal practice, in academia, in standards bodies and in corporate development to lay out a vision for protecting human rights and giving people a say in the AI era.

Enabling Web3 Social Networking through Open Protocols | Polkadot Decoded 2023

July 10, 2023 (44:45)
By: Polkadot

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrpSdfOBUp0

Speakers:

Wendy Seltzer, Tucows

Sara Wedeman, MIT

Erik Suhonen, Project Liberty

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Wikipedia

Wendy Seltzer is an American attorney and, as of January 2023, a staff member at Tucows where she is the Principal Identity Architect.[1] She is known for her many years of work with the World Wide Web Consortium,[2] where, among many roles, she was the chair of the Improving Web Advertising Business Group.[3]

Seltzer is also a Fellow with Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, where she founded the Lumen clearinghouse,[4] which is aimed at helping Internet users to understand their rights in response to cease-and-desist threats related to intellectual property and other legal demands.[5]

In the past, Seltzer served on the board of directors of the World Wide Web Foundation.[6] A former At-large Liaison to the ICANN board of directors,[7] she has advocated for increased transparency of the organization of, and for increased protection of, the privacy of Internet users. From April to July 2007, she was a Visiting Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute.[8]

Previously she was with Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy and was a visiting assistant professor at the Northeastern University School of Law and Brooklyn Law School, as well as a fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School,[9] and served on the board of directors of the Tor Project.[10] Before that, she was a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, specializing in intellectual property and free speech issues.

Seltzer has an A.B. from Harvard College ( and a J.D. from Harvard Law School (1999).[11] In 2007, she was the Visiting Fellow with the Oxford Internet Institute.[12]

Publications

  • "EFF Members Build Liberated TVs." Deeplinks (May 23, 2005). Electronic Frontier Foundation.
  • "Free speech unmoored in copyright's safe harbor: Chilling effects of the DMCA on the first amendment", Harv. JL & Tech 2010[13]
  • Abelson, Harold, et al. Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness after the Digital Explosion. 2nd ed., Addison-Wesley Professional, 2021.

References

  1. ^ "Tucows welcomes new employees that joined in January 2023". LinkedIn. Retrieved 20 April 2023.
  2. ^ "Who's Who at the World Wide Web Consortium". Retrieved 2012-01-31.
  3. ^ Schiff, Allison (2021-04-26). "An Inside Look At The W3C With Strategy Lead Wendy Seltzer, As Debate Swirls Around The Privacy Sandbox". AdExchanger. Retrieved 2021-05-21.
  4. ^ "Wendy Seltzer | USENIX". www.usenix.org. Retrieved 2024-04-13.
  5. ^ "Wendy Seltzer." (profile). Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Accessed November 30, 2008.
  6. ^ "World Wide Web Foundation Boards of Directors." webfoundation.org. Accessed January 31, 2012.
  7. ^ "ICANN Board of Directors". Retrieved 2012-01-31.
  8. ^ "Wendy Seltzer" (profile). Oxford Internet Institute. Accessed August 30, 2021.
  9. ^ "Wendy Seltzer" (faculty page). Yale Law School. Accessed October 10, 2011. Archived from the original.
  10. ^ "Tor Project, a Digital Privacy Group, Reboots With New Board." New York Times (July 14, 2016).
  11. ^ "Wendy Seltzer". V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media. Retrieved 2024-04-13.
  12. ^ "OII | Wendy Seltzer". www.oii.ox.ac.uk. Retrieved 2024-04-13.
  13. ^ "Free speech unmoored in copyright's safe harbor: Chilling effects of the DMCA on the first amendment". scholar.google.com. Retrieved 2024-04-13.
Speaking session: 11:20am, December 12, 2019.
source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendy_Seltzer

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