Keynote Speaker: Jonathan Zittrain

With the unwitting help of its users, the runaway success of the Internet is on a path to a lockdown, ending its cycle of innovation — and facilitating unsettling new kinds of control. The first wave of Internet-centered products — iPhones, Xboxes, TiVos, etc. — cannot be easily modified by anyone except their vendors or selected partners. As these and other “tethered appliances” and applications eclipse the PC, the very nature of the Internet — its “generativity,” or innovative character — is at risk.

Drawing on generative technologies like Wikipedia that have so far survived their own successes, Jonathan Zittrain offers ideas for developing new technologies and social structures that allow users to work creatively and collaboratively, participate in solutions, and become true “netizens.” 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.

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 held the Chair in Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford University and was 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. Additionally, Zittrain 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.

Zittrain 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.”

The paperback version of his book about the future of the now-intertwined Internet and PC, “The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It,” is due in March 2009 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.