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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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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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.
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I'm interested in helping secure the PC - we need innovation here. It's not just hug your PC, hate the iPhone. In fact I don't even hate the iPhone; I think it's really cool. I just don't want it to be the center of the ecosystem along with the Web 2.0 apps.
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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 last refuge of privacy cannot be placed solely in law or technology. It must repose in both, and a thoughtful combination of the two can help us thread a path between having all our secrets trivially discoverable and preserving nothing for our later selves for fear of that discovery.
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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.
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Through historical accident, we've ended up with a global network that pretty much allows anybody to communicate with anyone else at any time.
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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.
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I think social networking is absolutely here to stay. Now, whether or not the label will Facebook forever, depends in part, I think, on whether Facebook wants to try to be less proprietary, be more central to the operation of defining and stewarding identity online.
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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.
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People may be due the benefits of a democratic electoral process. But in the United States, content curators appropriately have a First Amendment right to present their content as they see fit.
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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.
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Owned technologies are easy to grasp because they're so prevalent. They're technologies that are developed and shaped by a defined group, usually someone selling it.
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You can already see the privacy debate moving to the realm of automated massive data mining. When governments begin to suspect people because of where they were at a certain time, it can get very worrying.