Jonathan Zittrain

Republican lawmakers are accusing the Obama administration of allowing countries like Russia, China and Iran to take control over the Internet. Their beef with the administration focuses on a relatively obscure nonprofit overseen by the U.S. government that is scheduled to become fully independent Saturday. The organization is called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN for short. Its history traces back to a graduate student at UCLA named Jon Postel. He started keeping track of the unique numbers assigned to particular computers using the Internet, during its early days. Jonathan Zittrain, an Internet law professor at Harvard, says Postel kept a clipboard to make sure no user had the same number — sort of like a phone book. "It was just sort of an honor system that would stop Caltech from coming in, or Bulgaria, from saying, 'You know what, we're going to start using those numbers,' " Zittrain says. "It's just something that would be a way of coordinating as people came online and needed to use numbers and, later, names."

Donald Trump has maintained for seven months that he cannot release his tax returns because he is being audited by the Internal Revenue Service, making him the first major-party nominee for president since President Gerald Ford to withhold such records from the public. Last week, his son Donald Trump Jr. gave a different excuse for not releasing the documents, saying the returns would be “distracting.” With so much speculation surrounding them, the GOP nominee and wealthy businessman’s tax filings may just be the most wanted information of the 2016 campaign...“The courts could say: If the public thinks the tax returns are so important, let it demand that the candidate authorize the IRS to release them on pain of losing votes,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a privacy expert and professor at Harvard Law School.

Facebook set a new land-speed record for situational irony this week, as it fired the people who kept up its “Trending Topics” feature and replaced them with an algorithm on Friday, only to find the algorithm promoting completely fake news on Sunday. Rarely in recent tech history has a downsizing decision come back to bite the company so publicly and so quickly...Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of law and computer science at Harvard University, likened Facebook’s decision to use impersonal aglorithms to “confining things to the roulette wheel.” “Even the casino isn’t supposed to know what number is going to win when it spins. And so, if there’s some issue, at least it isn’t intentional manipulation by Facebook,” he told me. Google claims the same innocence with its search results, he said.

An op-ed by Jonathan Zittrain. This month, Apple previewed some changes to its next generation of iPhones and iPads with the promise that “all the things you love to do are more expressive, more dynamic and more fun than ever.” That especially includes emojis, those little icons that, according to one study, 92 percent of the online population now make part of their everyday communication. One change in particular, though, is not delighting everyone. Apple’s new suite of operating systems appears to replace its pistol emoji, which was an image of a six-shooter, with a squirt gun...To eliminate an elemental concept from a language’s vocabulary is to reflect a sweeping view of how availability of language can control behavior, as well as a strange desire for companies — and inevitably, governments — to police our behavior through that language. In the United States, this confuses taking a particular position on the Second Amendment, concerning the right to bear arms, with the First, which guarantees freedom of speech, including speech about arms.

Do the benefits of allowing social platforms to host your journalism outweigh the disadvantages? Most publishers, however reluctantly, will say yes and adopt the “we are where we are” argument...In his 2008 book The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, Jonathan Zittrain invoked AOL and the rest as a counterpoint to the internet. He described the latter as a “generative” platform, one that “invites innovation” in contrast to the service offered by the former which he labelled “sterile appliances tethered to a network of control”. At the time of writing his book, Zittrain’s key frame of reference was the Apple iPhone, launched the previous year. Acknowledging that the iPhone was beautifully crafted, he cautioned that the control the company exerted over hardware and software ran counter to “much of what we now consider precious about the internet”.

Passcode’s group of digital security and privacy experts say the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) – meant to prevent illicit trespassing on computer systems – is written far too broadly and often results in punishments that are too harsh for the infractions. ...The broad legal boundaries of the CFAA have also allowed prosecutions of computer crimes to proceed if hackers are found to have violated a website’s terms-of-service agreement, some Influencers say. “That overreading should be soundly rejected,” says Jonathan Zittrain, a professor at Harvard Law School.

Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain has been searching tediously for answers involving impact websites like Google and Facebook may have on the election, according to Huffington Post. Zittrain has been floating around ideas about modified search results and customizing the news available to users, which could potentially sway undecided voters. Looking at all the dimensions of this picture makes one realize; this is one of those puzzles that came with some missing pieces.

The Pew Research Center reported this week that 62 percent of U.S. adults get news on social media, including 18 percent who do so often – that's up sharply from just four years ago when the figure was 49 percent...Suppose Facebook decided that it would be a good idea to help demographic groups which turn out in numbers that are lower than their share of the population, like, say, Latinos. Such targeted voter motivation, dubbed "digital gerrymandering" by Harvard Law School's Jonathan Zittrain, would have the salutary effect – if you're a Clinton supporter (and in case you're wondering, Facebook officials have given far more money to Clinton than anyone else this cycle) – of turning out more strongly Democratic voters.

...But this week, Facebook’s reputation for neutrality took a major hit...But even if Thune and other Republicans wanted to regulate Facebook, it’s not clear how they would do it. “It’s all tricky, because it’s all speech,” says Jonathan Zittrain, a law and computer-science professor at Harvard University and a co-founder of the school’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. At the end of the day, Facebook makes an editorial product, and like any editorial product it is protected under the First Amendment. But federal regulators or entrepreneurial legislators would still have several options...But Zittrain said there may be an even more promising way to keep Facebook from acting against its users’ interest. In an unpublished paper that he is writing with Jack Balkin, a Constitutional law professor at Yale Law School, Zittrain recommends that certain massive repositories of user data—like Apple, Facebook, and Google—be offered a chance to declare themselves “information fiduciaries.” An information fiduciary would owe certain protections to its users, closing the “disconnect between the level of trust we place in [online services] and the level of trust in fact owed to us,” according to the paper.

Facebook scrambled on Monday to respond to a new and startling line of attack: accusations of political bias. The outcry was set off by a report on Monday morning by the website Gizmodo, which said that Facebook’s team in charge of the site’s “trending” list had intentionally suppressed articles from conservative news sources. The social network uses the trending feature to indicate the most popular news articles of the day to users...“The agenda-setting power of a handful of companies like Facebook and Twitter should not be underestimated,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of computer science and law at Harvard University. “These services will be at their best when they are explicitly committed to serving the interests of their users rather than simply offering a service whose boundaries for influence are unknown and ever-changing.”

...With the election two days away, younger and urban Americans are terrified. Some are arranging ways for their Muslim friends to leave the country. That’s the atmosphere in which two senior Facebook engineers approach Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s CEO, and tell him that this whole mess can be stopped right now.... Jonathan Zittrain, a law and computer science professor at Harvard Universitywho has previously written about Facebook’s electoral power, told me it was good that Facebook was now on the record about not tampering with the vote. He confirmed that no legal mechanism would prevent them from trying it. “Facebook is not an originator of content so much, it is a funnel for it. And because it is a social network, it’s got quite natural market dominance,” he said. With that power came a need for public concern and awareness.

The IMLS grant awards over $700,000 to the Harvard Law School Library Innovation Lab, in cooperation with the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and more than 130 partner libraries, to sustainably scale Perma.cc to combat link rot in all scholarly fields.

Following a very public fight over the unlocking of the iPhone used by Syed Rizwan Farook, a gunman in the San Bernardino, Calif., shooting last December, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has found a way to crack the device without help from Apple. Now, will the federal agency have to tell the tech giant how it was done?..."While it is appropriate for law enforcement, with a warrant, to use a security flaw to gain access to which it is legally entitled, the flaw should be patched as soon as possible for everyone else’s sake,” Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of law and computer science at Harvard Law School, told the Monitor.