Jonathan Zittrain
Jonathan Zittrain
Jonathan L. Zittrain is an American professor of Internet law and the George Bemis Professor of International Law at Harvard Law School. He is also a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, a professor of computer science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and co-founder and director of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Previously, Zittrain was Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute of the University of Oxford and visiting professor...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEducator
Date of Birth24 December 1969
CountryUnited States of America
I think this is a very ripe time to take on some of the hardest questions. It's not a crazy position to say that these companies should not be there at all - but that's not my view, and I think there are ways to begin drawing lines so that there are ways that the companies can make the world better by being there.
How an individual's reputation is protected online is too important and subtle a policy matter to be legislated by a high court, which is institutionally mismatched to the evolving intricacies of the online world.
Content zips around the Internet thanks to code - programming code. And code is subject to intellectual property laws.
Despite outsiders being invited to write software, the iPhone thus remains tightly tethered to its vendor - the way that the Kindle is controlled by Amazon.
Search engines generally treat personal names as search terms like any others: Data is data.
So there's one set of countries, anchored by Iran, Cuba and China, that would like to see some process by which governments of the world have a much larger hand in controlling the shape of the internet.
Domain names themselves hardly matter anymore. We get to where we are going with search engines anyway. It's a largely symbolic battle.
This is completely irrelevant. Let me repeat that, this is completely irrelevant. Domain names are nearly meaningless at this point.
Attacks on Internet sites and infrastructure, and the compromise of secure information, pose a particularly tricky problem because it is usually impossible to trace an attack back to its instigator.
The Internet's distinct configuration may have facilitated anonymous threats, copyright infringement, and cyberattacks, but it has also kindled the flame of freedom in ways that the framers of the American constitution would appreciate - the Federalist papers were famously authored pseudonymously.
The Internet's distinct configuration may have made cyberattacks easy to launch, but it has also kindled the flame of freedom.
Digital books and music are often different from their physical counterparts in that consumers buy licences to a work, revocable under an ongoing contract, rather than their own copies.
The Internet works thanks to loose but trusted connections among its many constituent parts, with easy entry and exit for new Internet service providers or new forms of expanding access.
The ability to make new work from old work - especially if that new work is different enough that it doesn't dent the market for the old work - is something that benefits all creators, since so few can claim not to have a giant or 10 supporting them underneath.