The online horrors that keep Julie Inman Grant fighting
The e-Safety Commissioner talks about death threats, the dark corners of the internet and making an enemy of the richest man in the world, Elon Musk.
Julie Inman Grant can slay tech dragons, it seems, or at least take the fight to them – that’s why she gets up the nose of e-billionaires like Elon Musk.
It turns out that Inman Grant can also speak Italian, with what sounds to me like an impeccable accent.
I learn this when she orders the pappardelle with braised Wagyu beef cheek from our Italian waiter, as we sit down for lunch at Gowings Bar and Grill in the Sydney CBD.
It turns out the Italian is a legacy of a stint in Florence, while studying for her Masters in International Communications.
Inman Grant ended up falling in love with a Dutchman and living with him for a while in Holland, before taking a job for a telecommunications consultancy in Brussels.
As I discover over the course of our lunch, the eSafety Commissioner’s CV is long and contains many interesting turns, but it begins in Seattle, where she was raised by a single mother with a yen for adventure.
“My parents divorced when I was five … I grew up with my mum and my sister and a female dog, very close to the beach, so we would go to the beach after school,” she says.
Like all members of Generation X (Inman Grant is 57), she grew up in the vanished utopia of a phone-free childhood.
“She very much lived hand-to-mouth and she had this fascination with travel,” Inman Grant says.
“Dad would send child support payments, and she would use that for a trip to China.”
But, Inman Grant says, her mother “put herself in precarious situations where people had to bail her out financially”.
“So I think that imbued in me: never be dependent on another person or a partner for your economic self-sufficiency.”
Inman Grant attended Boston University where she studied international relations.
She graduated in 1990 and moved to Washington, DC, the following year, and landed a job with John Miller, a “Rockefeller” Republican congressman from her home state (Washington state).
A company called Microsoft was head-quartered in his congressional district, and he asked Inman Grant to take on technology along with her social policy portfolio.
“So it’s 1991, and here I am working at the intersection of policy, technology and social justice before there was an internet,” she says.
Later, in 1995 (after her Italian stint, the Dutch boyfriend and the career misfire in Brussels) she was recruited by Microsoft to open their government relations office.
It was the cusp of the internet age, and all the technology companies were jostling to ensure a benevolent regulatory environment.
As a lobbyist for Microsoft, Inman Grant was involved in shaping section 23
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