Jonathan Zittrain

Jonathan L. Zittrain (born December 24, 1969) 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 the Berkman Klein 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 at the New York University School of Law and Stanford Law School.

Zittrain, who grew up in the suburb of Churchill outside of Pittsburgh, graduated in 1987 from Shady Side Academy, a private school in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

He holds a bachelor's summa cum laude in cognitive science and artificial intelligence from Yale University, 1991, where he was a member of the Yale Political Union, Manuscript Society and Davenport College, a JD magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, 1995, where he was the winner of the Williston Negotiation Competition, and a master of public administration from Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, 1995.

He was law clerk for Stephen F. Williams of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and served with the U.S. Department of Justice and, in 1991, with the Department of State, as well as at the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in 1992 and 1994.

He was a longtime forum administrator, or sysop, for the online service CompuServe, serving for many years as the chief administrator for its private forum for all of its forum administrators.

In 2001 he helped found Chilling Effects, a collaborative archive created by Wendy Seltzer to protect lawful online activity from legal threats.

He also served as vice dean for Library and Information Resources at Harvard.

Zittrain is the son of two attorneys, Ruth A. Zittrain and Lester E. Zittrain.

Between 2001 and 2003 at Harvard's Berkman Center, Zittrain and Benjamin Edelman studied Internet filtering.

In 2001, Zittrain cofounded Chilling Effects with his students and former students, including its creator and leader, Wendy Seltzer.

In their tests during 2002, when Google had indexed almost 2.5 billion pages, they found sites blocked, from approximately 100 in France and Germany to 2,000 in Saudi Arabia, and 20,000 in the People's Republic of China.

The authors published a statement of issues and a call for data that year.

In 2004 with Jennifer K. Harrison, Zittrain published The Torts Game: Defending Mean Joe Greene, a book the authors dedicated to their parents.

His brother, Jeff, is an established Bay Area musician.

His sister, Laurie Zittrain Eisenberg, is a scholar of the Arab and Israeli conflict and teaches at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

Building on the work completed at the Berkman Center, ONI published special reports, case studies, and bulletins beginning in 2004, and as of 2008, offered research on filtering in 40 countries as well as by regions of the world.

Zittrain joined the staff of the University of Oxford in Oxford in the United Kingdom as of September 2005.

He held the Chair in Internet Governance and Regulation, was a principal of the Oxford Internet Institute, and was a Professorial Fellow of Keble College, which has developed a particular interest in computer science and public policy.

In the United States, he was also the Jack N. & Lillian R. Berkman Visiting Professor for Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts and director and founder with Charles Nesson of its Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

Zittrain was a visiting professor at the Stanford Law School in 2007 and was a visiting professor at New York University School of Law in Manhattan for the spring 2008 semester.

Zittrain taught, or taught with others, Harvard's courses on Cyberlaw: Internet Points of Control, The Exploding Internet: Building A Global Commons in Cyberspace, Torts, Internet & Society: The Technologies and Politics of Control, The Law of Cyberspace, The Law of Cyberspace: Social Protocols, Privacy Policy, The Microsoft Case, and The High Tech Entrepreneur.

He searched for novel ways to use technology unobtrusively in the classroom at Harvard, founded H2O and used the system to teach his classes.

Students are polled, assigned opposing arguments, and use H2O to develop their writing skills.

Students enrolled in his The Internet and Society class could participate both orally and via the Internet.

A teaching fellow seated in the classroom supplied Zittrain with the comments received from students in real time via e-mail as well as through "chat" or "instant message" from students participating in the class while logged into Second Life.

(www.secondlife.com)

He has been critical of the process used by ICANN, the International Telecommunication Union and the World Summit on the Information Society.

Although he describes their approach as, in some ways, simple and naïve, Zittrain sees more hope in the open Internet Engineering Task Force model and in the ethical code and assumption of good faith that govern Wikipedia.

He is the author of The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It as well as co-editor of the books, Access Denied (MIT Press, 2008), Access Controlled (MIT Press, 2010), and Access Contested (MIT Press, 2011).

Zittrain works in several intersections of the Internet with law and policy including intellectual property, censorship and filtering for content control, and computer security.

He founded a project at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society that develops classroom tools.

He wrote in 2008, "Wikipedia—with the cooperation of many Wikipedians—has developed a system of self-governance that has many indicia of the rule of law without heavy reliance on outside authority or boundary."

In 2009 Zittrain was elected to the Internet Society's board of trustees for a four-year term.

In February 2011 he joined the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

In May 2011 Zittrain was made for Federal Communications Commission Distinguished Scholar.

In May 2012 he was made for Chair at Federal Communications Commission Open Internet Advisory Committee.

The OpenNet Initiative (ONI) monitors Internet censorship by national governments.

As of 2016, Zittrain remains a principal investigator at ONI, together with Ronald Deibert of the University of Toronto, John Palfrey, who was previously the executive director of the Berkman Center (now the head of School at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts ), and Rafal Rohozinski of the University of Cambridge.