By Andrew Cohen
Innovative and powerful leadership is evident throughout the Berkeley Law community, from students and alumni to faculty and staff. We highlight various examples to showcase how such leadership advances justice, accountability, and the rule of law.
Well before the tech explosion fundamentally changed the world, Daniel Dobrygowski ’07 saw the magnitude of its impact and implications. For over a decade as the World Economic Forum’s head of governance and trust, his pioneering work established him as a leading advocate for sound technology governance — and for recognizing it as essential for equality and human dignity.
Dobrygowski now leads the cybersecurity legal function at Sophos, a global company that protects businesses against ransomware, phishing, and malware. Global think tanks and major publications have featured his work on digital trust, cyber risk, and digital democracy, and he has advised many national and international organizations overseeing technology.
Named one of the 100 most influential corporate governance leaders by the National Association of Corporate Directors, Dobrygowski has counseled tech sector clients as a lawyer in Washington, D.C., and San Francisco. His new book, Technology Governance: Build Trust into Digital Innovation, offers practical tools to help business leaders make sound choices for mitigating risk and building trustworthy innovation.
Below, Dobrygowski describes his formative experience at Berkeley Law and ensuing work to embed trust into tech creation, production, and distribution.
What sparked your interest in law school?
After college, I joined Teach for America and had planned to make teaching my profession. From my experiences in urban schools in Paterson, N.J., I realized I needed to do more. The structural and legal barriers my students faced needed a response I couldn’t provide from inside the classroom. Meanwhile, a technological revolution — the widespread adoption of the internet and the web — was leaving students like mine further behind, laying the roots of a more unjust society. I’d always tinkered with computers and new tech, so the inequality I already saw and the potential for new tech to exacerbate it were deeply connected in my mind.
As I came to understand how social and legal structures combine to create or deny opportunity, the law started to feel like the most powerful tool available to address some of the structural problems I had seen. I began to recognize that effective law and governance could be especially helpful for making technology work for most people.
Why did you choose Berkeley Law and what was your most meaningful student experience?
Berkeley represented two things to me: a commitment to social justice and global leadership on technology and the law. Other schools were beginning to recognize technology’s impact on the world, but only Berkeley had programs already underway to ensure that regular people could have a voice in shaping the laws and expectations that should guide how new technologies are developed.
I loved being part of the Berkeley Technology Law Journal. At the time, it was one of the few law journals grappling seriously with questions at the intersection of law and technology. Working there gave me a head start on questions the rest of the world is only now catching up to — privacy, misinformation, cybersecurity, antitrust, consumer protection — and how each of those fields would eventually collide with rapidly developing technologies. My coursework and journal experience gave me the tools to understand and ultimately help shape the forces driving technology.
Why is advocating for responsible tech development and governance a priority for you?
Across my career, I’ve jumped into a lot of different issues: education, law, voter protection, global diplomacy, tech governance. One through-line has guided my work: the ability of people to have a say in how they get to live their own lives. Education, community, democracy — these are all foundations of human dignity. Protecting that dignity and people’s agency is what drives me.
Even when I wasn’t working directly in the technology industry, I was watching what technology did to people and thinking about what it could do for people. In the late 1990s, sociologists began identifying gaps in access to new technologies deeply stratified by class and race. As a teacher, I worried about the emergence of digital “haves” and “have-nots.” Over the past decade, something even more troubling has emerged: a growing gap between the small group of people who decide which technologies get built and what they’re allowed to do, and everyone else who has to live in the world those technologies create.
What are the implications for the result of that?
The social inequality being created may be one of the biggest problems facing justice and fairness for our generation. We’re also seeing an inequality between businesses. A handful of tech and AI giants appear to operate without meaningful financial or legal limits, while most businesses are left holding the liability for technology failures they had no power to prevent.
There’s a real threat here to the kind of entrepreneurship that helps working class people and new immigrants build more stable lives. There’s also a risk that in order to compete, every business — since they all have to adopt new technologies — will get caught up in a logic of irresponsibility and accelerate worse outcomes for both individuals and society.
What was the driving motivation for your new book?
I wanted to show how important private-sector leadership is for technology. A lot of business leaders have been trapped into a go-along-to-get-along mentality around tech, just adopting the opinions of venture capitalists whose incentives are very different from most businesses and most people. It doesn’t have to be that way. Every business can make better decisions about technology: better for individuals, for society, and for the business itself. I also wanted everyday people to understand what they should be demanding from those businesses if they want a more equitable and innovative future.
What worries you most about the tech and AI explosion, and what gives you hope?
My biggest concern is that the economic race to control the most powerful AI systems has produced a pattern of decisions that increasingly exclude people from the process. That’s a fairness problem and a governance problem. Bad decisions made now could be locked in as AI becomes ubiquitous, and reversing them will be far harder than getting them right from the start.
That said, I’m genuinely hopeful that the pattern is reversible. In Technology Governance, I describe the pendulum of technology decision-making swinging toward deregulation and irresponsibility in 2024 and 2025, but I also argue that it can swing back. I think we’re already seeing the beginning of that reversal.
Lawyers play a critical role in holding technology developers accountable for their worst excesses. The recent courtroom losses by Meta for knowingly making social media more addictive for children and failing to protect minors from online predators are a clear example. In my research for the book, I had illuminating conversations with engineers and technologists who are using AI and other emerging tools to promote safety at scale and to build better mechanisms for responsible development.
My hope is that Technology Governance can help shift what constitutes reasonable business judgment around tech. So far, the prevailing wisdom (if we can call it that) was that growth at any cost is the only way businesses using technology should operate. My book aims to show another way, where responsibility for tech spurs innovation and growth over the long term. I’m hopeful that ideas like this can supplant the business judgment we’ve seen so far in tech.
How can technology and tech governance best support equality, the rule of law, and other guardrails of democracy now under threat?
Technology governance is ultimately about choice: making decisions regarding the technologies we develop that respect people’s expectations and values. No one wants technology to erode democracy, widen inequality, or harm individuals. The implicit agreement underlying public support for innovation is that new technologies won’t violate those baseline expectations or betray our core values. Technology governance is how we keep that promise and how we agree on a plan to repair things when they go wrong.
The ways technology has damaged democracy and the rule of law over the past decade are not an inevitable feature of computers, the internet, or AI. These are general-purpose technologies. The threat to democracy isn’t the product of the technology itself, it’s the product of choices people have made about how those technologies are allowed to be used. When a small number of actors capture the benefits of new technology while offloading the risks onto everyone else, that’s not a natural law. It’s a policy failure and a governance failure.
Technology governance is the system we put in place to define a better set of choices and demand better decisions. As I write in the book, the idea that holding tech companies to any standard of responsibility risks innovation is a self-serving narrative. It locks in one set of choices where a few accrue all the benefits while most people deal with the harms better decisions could have prevented. Technology touches every part of society, and so every part of society must have a say in what choices are available to the people who build it. That’s what good governance makes possible.