Jonathan Zittrain

Harvard University | Harvard · Harvard Law School

It has become increasingly common for a reader to follow a URL cited in a court opinion or a law review article, only to be met with an error message because the resource has been moved from its original online address. This form of reference rot, commonly referred to as ‘linkrot’, has arisen from the disconnect between the transience of online mat...

What is the Web? What makes it work? And is it dying? This paper is drawn from a talk delivered by Prof. Zittrain to the Royal Society Discussion Meeting 'Web science: a new frontier' in September 2010. It covers key questions about the way the Web works, and how an understanding of its past can help those theorizing about the future. The original...

This briefing document was developed as part of a March 30, 2012 workshop entitled “Public Networks for Public Safety: A Workshop on the Present and Future of Mesh Networking,” hosted by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. The event provided a starting point for conversation about whether mesh networks could be adopted...

When people took to the streets across the UK in the summer of 2011, the Prime Minister suggested restricting access to digital and social media in order to limit their use in organizing. The resulting debate complemented speculation on the effects of social media in the Arab Spring and the widespread critique of President Mubarak's decision to shu...

Which side was Steve Jobs on?

Fear of cyberattacks should not lead us to destroy what makes the Internet special

Experts examine censorship, surveillance, and resistance across Asia, from China and India to Malaysia and the Philippines. © 2012 The President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved.

Popular imagination holds that the turf of a state’s foreign embassy is a little patch of its homeland. Enter the American Embassy in Beijing and you are in the United States. Indeed, in many contexts – such as resistance to search and seizure by a host country’s authorities – there is an inviolability to diplomatic outposts. These arrangements hav...

In August 2010, selected faculty and researchers at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, an independent, exploratory study analyzing ICANN’s decision-making processes and communications with its stakeholders. The study focused on developing a framework and recommendations for understanding and improving ICANN’s accountab...

Jonathan Zittrain, The Fourth Quadrant, 78 Fordham Law Review 2767 (2010).

Robert Faris and Jonathan Zittrain chart the highs and lows for free expression online in 2009: from the triumph over Green Dam to cyber attacks

Nature regulars give their recommendations for relaxed, inspiring holiday reading and viewing - from climate-change history to Isaac Newton the detective.

A high-profile copyright activist is fighting for traditional publishers to stop criminalizing their own readers, explains Jonathan Zittrain.

Technologies that allow contributions from anywhere and trust of unknown contributors at first thrive in elite communities where people have the technical astuteness to know how to manage them and the ethos of tinkering and mutual assistance. As the platforms' popularity increases and they enter the mainstream, greater numbers and a decline in the...

This extraordinary book explains the engine that has catapulted the Internet from backwater to ubiquity—and reveals that it is sputtering precisely because of its runaway success. With the unwitting help of its users, the generative Internet is on a path to a lockdown, ending its cycle of innovation—and facilitating unsettling new kinds of control....

Ubiquitous computing means network connectivity everywhere, linking devices and systems as small as a drawing pin and as large as a worldwide product distribution chain. What could happen when people are so readily networked? This paper explores issues arising from two possible emerging models of ubiquitous human computing: fungible networked brain...

Many countries around the world block or filter Internet content, denying access to information--often about politics, but also relating to sexuality, culture, or religion--that they deem too sensitive for ordinary citizens. Access Denied documents and analyzes Internet filtering practices in over three dozen countries, offering the first rigorousl...

Net Neutrality' is a very heated and contested United States policy principle regarding access for content providers to the Internet end-user, and potential discrimination in that access where the end-user's ISP (or another ISP) blocks that access in part or whole. The suggestion is that the problem can be resolved by either introducing greater com...

The Internet goose has laid countless golden eggs, along with a growing number of rotten ones. But it's the rotten ones that now tempt commercial, governmental, and consumer interests to threaten the Internet's uniquely creative power. The expediently selected, almost accidentally generative properties of the Internet - its technical openness, ease...

We assess the impact of spam that touts stocks upon the trading activity of those stocks and sketch how profitable such spamming might be for spammers and how harmful it is to those who heed advice in stock-touting e-mails. We find convincing evidence that stock prices are being manipulated through spam. We suggest that the effectiveness of spammed...

This essay responds to Orin S. Kerr, Searches and Seizures in a Digital World, 119 Harv. L. Rev. 531 (2005), http://ssrn.com/abstract=697541. Professor Kerr has published a thorough and careful article on the application of the Fourth Amendment to searches of computers in private hands - a treatment that has previously escaped the attentions of leg...

The brief but intense history of American judicial and legislative confrontation with problems caused by the online world has demonstrated a certain wisdom: a reluctance to intervene in ways that dramatically alter online architectures; a solicitude for the collateral damage that interventions might wreak upon innocent activity; and, in the balance...

The generative capacity for unrelated and unaccredited audiences to build and distribute code and content through the Internet to its tens of millions of attached personal computers has ignited growth and innovation in information technology and has facilitated new creative endeavors. It has also given rise to regulatory and entrepreneurial backlas...

The tech industry has a really good grasp of what works and how its products will be used-and that's killing innovation, says the Berkman Center's Jonathan Zittrain.

China's Internet filtering regime is the most sophisticated effort of its kind in the world. Compared to similar efforts in other states, China's filtering regime is pervasive, sophisticated, and effective. It comprises multiple levels of legal regulation and technical control. It involves numerous state agencies and thousands of public and private...

The production of most mass-market software can be grouped roughly according to free and proprietary development models. These models differ greatly from one another, and their associated licenses tend to insist that new software inherit the characteristics of older software from which it may be derived. Thus the success of one model or another can...

As the Internet becomes part of daily living rather than a place to visit, its rough edges are smoothed and its extremes tamed by sovereigns wanting to protect consumers, prevent network resource abuse, and eliminate speech deemed harmful. The tools are now within reach to permit sovereigns with competing rulesets to play down their differences - w...

We collected data on the methods, scope, and depth of selective barriers to Internet usage through networks in China. Tests conducted from May through November 2002 indicated at least four distinct and independently operable Internet filtering methods - Web server IP address, DNS server IP address, keyword, and DNS redirection with a quantifiable l...

The online availability of pornography and unauthorized intellectual property has driven Internet growth while giving rise to efforts to make the Net more regulable. Early efforts to control the Internet have targeted the endpoints of the network - the sources and recipients of objectionable material - and to some extent the intermediaries who host...

The authors are collecting data on the methods, scope, and depth of selective barriers to Internet access through Chinese networks. Tests from May 2002 through November 2002 indicate at least four distinct and independently operable methods of Internet filtering, with a documentable leap in filtering sophistication beginning in September 2002. The...

Abstract This demonstration will showcase the H2O project at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society in general and the H2O Rotisserie discussion tool specifically H2O is a nonprofit software development project that develops innovative educational tools designed not only to improve the academic educational experience but also to export the best...

In the spring of 1998, the U.S. government told the Internet: Govern yourself. This unfocused order - a blandishment, really, expressed as an awkward "statement of policy" by the Department of Commerce, carrying no direct force of law - came about because the management of obscure but critical centralized Internet functions was at a political cross...

This article begins with a premise that intellectual property and privacy have something significant and yet understated in common: both are about balancing a creator's desire to control a particular set of data with consumers' desires to access and redistribute that data. Both law and technology influence such balancing, making it more or less pal...

Current tax law--and the current technical architecture of the Internet--make it difficult to enforce sales taxes on most Internet commerce. This has generated considerable policy debate. In this paper, we analyze the costs and benefits of enforcing such taxes including revenue losses, competition with retail, externalities, distribution, and compl...

Microsoft has brilliantly exploited its current control of the personal computer operating system (OS) market to grant itself advantages towards controlling tomorrow's operating system market as well. This is made possible by the control Microsoft has asserted over user "defaults," a power Microsoft possesses thanks to a combination of (1) Windows'...

The model of university as producer of knowledge-as-product-for-sale is a closed one. Knowledge is treated as property to be copyrighted, patented, classified, licensed, and litigated. Under this closed model, creative work cannot progress without negotiations about license fees (the ambit of legal "fair use" at a minimum). As faculty become work-f...

The interaction between law, policy, and technology as they relate to the evolving controversies over control of the Internet. Topics include: intellectual property and copyright control, privacy and government surveillance, and freedom of expression and content control.