Tristan Louis

Tristan Louis
Tristan Louis, circa 2000
Born	(1971-02-28) February 28, 1971 (age 46) Digne-les-Bains, France
Occupation	Internet entrepreneur / Writer

Tristan Louis (born February 28, 1971 in Digne-les-Bains, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence) is a French-born American author, entrepreneur and internet activist.

In 1994 and 1995, as publisher of iWorld, part of the Mecklermedia group of Internet online media companies, Louis first became involved in online politics on Usenet, particularly the newsgroup alt.internet.media-coverage, during debate over the Communications Decency Act and activism against it. In a joint effort with the EFF and the Voters Telecommunications Watch, iWorld and Mecklermedia publicly endorsed a national day of protest , turning the background of web pages around the world to black. The protest received national news coverage and was a catalyst in the planning for a lawsuit (Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union) which went to the United States Supreme Court and reaffirmed First Amendment protection for Internet publishers.

After leaving iWorld, Louis contributed to many publications as a freelance writer, including a popular line of introductions to the internet, and helped co-found several start-ups, including Earthweb and Net Quotient, a consulting group. At Earthweb, Louis reprised his role of editor, hoping to reproduce the early success of iWorld.

From 1999 to early 2000, Louis joined the short-lived dot-com Boo.com; when the company failed, he wrote a detailed analysis of the challenges the company had faced, offering some context in terms of running large scale websites, which was widely circulated.