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
The rest of the world doesn't want to see US hegemony here, in large part just for symbolic reasons,
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.
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.
Citizens identify with something larger than themselves - if one's country is attacked, it can feel like a personal attack in a way that a fellow bank customer's account theft does not feel like a personal invasion.
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.
I'm interested in harnessing the good will and distributed power of people, including novices.
This is completely irrelevant. Let me repeat that, this is completely irrelevant. Domain names are nearly meaningless at this point.
The Internet is a collective hallucination: one of the best humanity has ever generated.
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.
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.