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
With the rise of software patents, engineers coding new stuff - whether within a large software company or as kids writing smartphone apps - are exposed to a claim that somewhere a prior patent is being infringed.
The power and promise of the Internet is that anyone can write and distribute code for tens of millions of others to adopt and run. The downside of this is that bad code can too readily get onto the public's PCs. Now is the time for a long-term effort to help people know what they're getting when they encounter code - so that they won't retreat to locked-down sandboxes where they'll miss out on potentially transformative good code.
We need better options for securing the Internet. Instead of looking primarily for top-down government intervention, we can enlist the operators and users themselves.
The crucial legacy of the personal computer is that anyone can write code for it and give or sell that code to you - and the vendors of the PC and its operating system have no more to say about it than your phone company does about which answering machine you decide to buy.
One repressive state after another has had to face the dilemma of wanting abundant Internet for economic advancement, while ruing the ways in which its citizens can become empowered to express themselves fearlessly.
All sorts of factors contribute to what Facebook or Twitter present in a feed, or what Google or Bing show us in search results. Our expectation is that those intermediaries will provide open conduits to others' content and that the variables in their processes just help yield the information we find most relevant.
We face paired dangers. The first is that our networks are successfully attacked. The second is that our fear of attack will cause us to destroy what makes the Internet special.
Through historical accident, we've ended up with a global network that pretty much allows anybody to communicate with anyone else at any time.
When something online is free, you're not the customer, you're the product.
If what you are getting online is for free, you are not the customer, you are the product.
Being closed to outsiders made the iPhone reliable and predictable.