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
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.
Online auction sites have been a fairly active area of dispute, ... is still unclear.
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.
What is law, ultimately, but the exercise of force?
TV broadcasting is owned, in the sense that governments around the world have asserted power over the airwaves that permeate their territories, deciding who can use what bandwidth and why - and those with licenses then, with exceptions determined by regulators, decide what to broadcast.
To me, Congress would have been wise to say 'If you build a system that approximates the balance of rights with copyright itself, we'll protect it. If you go overboard, you are on your own,' ... It would have been a harder act to create because it would have had a gray zone ... but that's what we pay legislators to do -- to write subtle legislation.
The openness on which Apple had built its original empire had been completely reversed - but the spirit was still there among users. Hackers vied to 'jailbreak' the iPhone, running new apps on it despite Apple's desire to keep it closed.
The other issue it raises is the kind of speech we'll hear. The strongest speech people see when they're voting is the speech when they're going to the ballot.
There has been a misconception -- and a helpful one -- among many government bureaucrats that the Internet is a non-geographic phenomenon. But it can be reworked to correspond to national jurisdictions and boundaries.
The realization that every digital movement is recorded and monitored itself will chill private behavior.
When I worry about privacy, I worry about peer-to-peer invasion of privacy. About the fact that anytime anything of any note happens, there are three arms holding cell phones with cameras in them or video records capturing the event ready to go on the nightly news, if necessary.
Facebook draws from the public and public-interest sphere, a simultaneously bold and modest step towards acknowledging that our new networked technologies deeply affect our lives in ways not always captured or best shaped by the typical template of consumer and seller.
Facebook allows outsiders to add functionality to the site but reserves the right to change that policy at any time, to charge a fee for applications, or to de-emphasize or eliminate apps that court controversy or that they simply don't like.
Domain names themselves hardly matter anymore. We get to where we are going with search engines anyway. It's a largely symbolic battle.