Andrea Appella

Associate General Counsel EMEA OpenAI

Andrea is a leading international expert of competition/regulatory law, artificial intelligence and the intersection with intellectual property law in the media/tech industries, where he held senior in-house positions in international groups. He is currently Associate General Counsel, EMEA at OpenAI and a Visiting Professor at Kings College Dickson Poon School of Law in London, where he teaches the course “Competition and Intellectual Property in the Media Industry: Law and Practice” in the LLM program.

Previously, Andrea worked for Netflix (Head of Global Competition, 2019-2022), News Corporation/21st Century Fox (Senior Vice President and Deputy General Counsel, 2009-2019), Time Warner Europe (Associate General Counsel, 2003-2008), Warner Bros (1999-2002) and MTV Europe (1998-1999). He began his career as a solicitor at Herbert Smith (1994-1997), where he returned as Consultant for Global TMT and Competition, Regulatory and Trade in 2023. [1]

He is also a Member of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Centro Sperimentale Cinema, a Director of Cinecitta’s training programme “Next Generation Lawyers”, a member of the Innovation, Regulation and Competition Policy Centre (ICPC) at the Universita’ Europea in Rome and a Non-Governmental Advisor (NGA) to the International Competition Network (ICN) appointed by the UK Competition and Markets Authority.

Over the years, he has been involved in a wide range of market-leading competition and regulatory cases in the entertainment and tech industries, advising executives on some of the most transformational cases, M&As, investigations and policy developments across all media and tech sectors globally: movies, TV networks, pay-tv, music, production, sport, news, publishing, digital platforms, online streaming, games. He has also been at the forefront of the digital policy debates, from the Digital Single Market to the application of competition rules and copyright to the digital economy, the regulation of digital platforms, the intersection with IP, data protection and consumer laws, and more recently the challenges posed by artificial intelligence, the metaverse and NFTs.