Jonathan Zittrain - Later Career

Later Career

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 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.