Professor of Law at Harvard Law School
Joined on November 9, 2005
Total Post Views: 33,280
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Jonathan Zittrain is a Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Previously, he was the Chair in Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford University and a principal of the Oxford Internet Institute. He was also a visiting professor at the New York University School of Law and Stanford Law School.
Zittrain was a co-founder of the Berkman Center, where he served as its first executive director from 1997 to 2000. Before receiving his tenure this year, he was the Jack N. & Lillian R. Berkman Visiting Professor for Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School.
Zittrain’s research interests include battles for control of digital property and content, cryptography, electronic privacy, the roles of intermediaries within Internet architecture, and the useful and unobtrusive deployment of technology in education. He was co-counsel with Lawrence Lessig in Eldred v. Ashcroft, challenging the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998. The case lost 7-2 at the Supreme Court.
With students, he began Chilling Effects, a web site that tracks and archives legal threats made to Internet content producers. Google now sends its users to Chilling Effects when it has altered its search results at the behest of national governments.
He also performed the first large-scale tests of Internet filtering in China and Saudi Arabia in 2002, and as part of the OpenNet Initiative, he has co-edited a study of Internet filtering by national governments, “Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering.”
His book about the future of the now-intertwined Internet and PC, “The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It,” came out in April 2008 from Yale University Press and Penguin UK — and under a Creative Commons license.
Zittrain holds a bachelor’s degree in cognitive science and artificial intelligence from Yale University, a J.D. from Harvard Law School, and a master’s in public administration from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
Except where otherwise noted, all postings by Jonathan Zittrain on CircleID are licensed under a Creative Commons License.
It's hard to know what to make of the Google/Verizon deal since until earlier today both companies have denied that there is one. And it's hard to argue about net neutrality because it means so many different things to different people. I've got lots of reading to do to catch up on the newly released set of principles from the companies, but in the meantime here are a few thoughts on the topic. more
Today the Berkman Center announced a new project that might be of interest to readers. Since 2002 I've studied Internet filtering around the world, most recently as part of the OpenNet Initiative. Last year with support of the MacArthur Foundation we published "Access Denied," a study of filtering in about 40 states. Our work so far has been centralized... We're now complementing that effort with a distributed reporting system... more
I confess, I don't get it. Much has been written about the apparent desire by the United Nations, spurred by China, Cuba, and other informationally repressive regimes, to "take control of the Internet." Oddly, the concrete focus of this battle -- now the topic of a Senate resolution! -- is a comparatively trivial if basic part of Net architecture: the domain name system. The spotlight on domain name management is largely a combination of historical accident and the unfortunate assignment of country code domains like .uk and .eu, geographically-grounded codes that give the illusion of government outposts and control in cyberspace. more
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