The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It

  • Jonathan L. Zittrain | Oxford University, Chair in Internet Governance and Regulation

Can we save the Internet from ourselves? The Internet and PCs that connect to it are “generative”: they can be changed by anyone, anywhere. This quality has fueled innovations that enhance our lives in ways we could never have predicted. Wikipedia, Facebook and YouTube are all products of this generativity, created by individuals with good ideas and the freedom to explore and share them. Yet the same openness that nourishes innovators makes these systems vulnerable to abuse, and with the unwitting help of consumers, the Internet is on a path to appliancized lockdown, a closing down of opportunity and innovation that will be difficult to reverse. Must we choose between freedom and security or can we have both? Solutions lie with new tools that cultivate the cooperative uses of technology.

Speaker Details

Jonathan Zittrain holds the Chair in Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford University and is a principal of the Oxford Internet Institute. He is also the Jack N. and Lillian R. Berkman Visiting Professor for Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School, where he co-founded Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society in 1996. With students, he began Chilling Effects, a website that tracks and archives legal threats made to Internet content providers. His 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 performed the first large-scale tests of Internet filtering in China and Saudi Arabia in 2002, and now as part of the OpenNet Initiative he has co-edited a study of Internet filtering by national governments.

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