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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The Internet's distinct configuration may have made cyberattacks easy to launch, but it has also kindled the flame of freedom.
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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.
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Content zips around the Internet thanks to code - programming code. And code is subject to intellectual property laws.
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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.
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Search engines generally treat personal names as search terms like any others: Data is data.
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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.
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(With the DMCA) you have the sword of Damocles,
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When I think about privacy on social media sites, there's kind of the usual suspect problems, which doesn't make them any less important or severe; it's just we kind of know their shape, and we kind of know how we're going to solve them.
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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.
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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.