Harvard Law School Professor Jonathan Zittrain has been named among the 100 Foreign Policy Global Thinkers for 2012.
The annual list from Foreign Policy (FP) “presents a unique portrait of 2012’s global marketplace of ideas and the thinkers who make them.” This year’s list also features Alex Macgillivray ’00, who serves as general counsel for Twitter, and danah boyd, a visiting researcher at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society.
The editors of FP, a print and online source for international politics and global affairs, noted that “more than anyone, Zittrain has asked who the Internet’s public and private gatekeepers are, how they’re acting, and what that means for the future of the open web.”
FP hails Zittrain as “the general counsel of the digital age” as he continues to tackle some of the thorniest problems in cyberspace, such as: “Is Internet access a human right? How do we respect the rights of the unwitting people who become the subject of Internet memes? Is it legal for an insurance company to set rates for its customers based on GPS data?”
Zittrain, in addition to serving on the HLS faculty and as the law school’s vice-dean of Library and Information Resources, also serves on the faculties of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government (HKS) and School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). He is also co-founder and faculty co-director of the Berkman Center, and chair of the Federal Communications Commission’s Open Internet Advisory Committee.
Zittrain’s 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 is the author of “The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It” (Yale University Press & Penguin UK, 2008), which focuses on the future of the Internet and the PC.