Jonathan Zittrain

George Bemis Professor of International Law, Harvard · Co-Founder, Berkman Klein Center · Internet Governance and AI Ethics Scholar

Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

Harvard Law School

Harvard Kennedy School

Harvard SEASBerkman Klein Center

EFF Board

Oxford Internet Institute (former)

OpenNet Initiative

Biography

Jonathan L. Zittrain (born December 24, 1969) is one of the founding figures of cyberlaw and internet governance as academic disciplines—a scholar whose career has threaded together computer science, law, public policy, and ethics since the internet first became a mass phenomenon. He holds three simultaneous appointments at Harvard: the George Bemis Professorship of International Law at Harvard Law School, a professorship of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and a professorship of computer science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). He is co-founder and faculty director of Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, faculty director of the Harvard Law School Library, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and a former trustee of the Internet Society. The World Economic Forum named him a Young Global Leader; he served as Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at the Federal Communications Commission, where he also chaired the Open Internet Advisory Committee.

Zittrain grew up in the Pittsburgh suburb of Churchill and first encountered computers in 1983 when his parents gave him a $99 Texas Instruments TI-99/4A. He dialed into CompuServe on a hand-me-down television set, ran up a $300 bill the first month, and never really stopped. He taught himself to code—first in TI Extended Basic, later in Lisp — and wrote a host program for a bulletin board system while still in high school. He graduated from Shady Side Academy in Pittsburgh in 1987, earned a BA summa cum laude in cognitive science and artificial intelligence from Yale in 1991 (where he was active in the Yale Political Union, the Manuscript Society, and Davenport College), and took both a JD magna cum laude and a Master of Public Administration from Harvard in 1995. He clerked for Judge Stephen F. Williams on the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, served with the US Department of Justice, and had stints at the Department of State (1991) and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (1992 and 1994) before joining the Harvard Law faculty. He has been a visiting professor at both Stanford Law School and NYU School of Law.

Berkman Klein Center and the Field of Cyberlaw

In 1997, together with Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson, Zittrain co-founded what was then the Berkman Center for Internet and Society—now the Berkman Klein Center — at Harvard Law School. It was one of the earliest university research centers devoted to studying the internet as a social, legal, and political phenomenon rather than a purely technical one, and it helped define what an entire generation of scholars, policymakers, lawyers, and journalists understood about the internet's relationship to law, rights, and governance. The Centre has produced landmark research, convened pivotal conversations, and trained hundreds of fellows who have gone on to shape internet policy in governments, civil society organizations, and companies around the world. Zittrain has served as its co-founder and faculty director since its inception, building it from a small Harvard initiative into a global institution with affiliates and fellows on every continent.

Before his permanent return to Harvard, Zittrain held the inaugural Chair in Internet Governance and Regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), the University of Oxford's multidisciplinary research centre on the social science of the internet, where he was also a principal of the OII and a Professorial Fellow of Keble College. His Oxford period deepened his engagement with the comparative dimensions of internet governance—how different legal traditions, political cultures, and technical architectures produce different kinds of online environments—and his collaboration with Oxford colleagues shaped the OpenNet Initiative and the Access series of empirical censorship studies.

The Generativity Thesis and The Future of the Internet

Zittrain's most widely discussed contribution to internet theory is his 2008 book The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It (Yale University Press and Penguin UK), which introduced and elaborated the concept of "generativity." A generative technology, in his account, is one that allows outsiders—people other than its original creators—to build new things on top of it and share them without needing the platform owner's permission or even knowledge. The personal computer was generative; the early internet was generative; so was the World Wide Web. Generativity, Zittrain argued, was the engine of the internet's explosive growth and its most valuable social property — because it meant that no one had to predict in advance what innovations would matter. Crucially, however, he also argued that generativity carries the seeds of its own undermining: generative systems invite malicious code, spam, fraud, and security threats, and users respond by migrating to locked-down, permission-controlled environments—appliances, like early game consoles or smartphones tightly controlled by their manufacturers—that are safer but far less fertile. The book predicted, years before the smartphone wars settled into the duopoly of iOS and Android, that the internet's open architecture was under structural threat not from government censorship alone but from the preferences of ordinary users seeking security and simplicity. The book is available from Yale University Press, Penguin UK, and under a Creative Commons licence. Computerworld, interviewing Zittrain at the book's release, summarized the core problem as: "the very features that make the Internet great — openness, the ability of anyone to innovate — have also unleashed forces that could undo it."

Projects and Initiatives

OpenNet Initiative (ONI)

Co-founded 2002–03

A multi-university research partnership (Harvard, Oxford, Toronto, Cambridge) that conducted the first systematic empirical tests of internet filtering by national governments. Zittrain and Benjamin Edelman performed the original large-scale tests in China and Saudi Arabia between 2001 and 2003; the ONI published three major co-edited volumes — Access Denied, Access Controlled, and Access Contested (all MIT Press) — documenting internet censorship practices globally.

Berkman Klein Center

Co-founded 1997

Harvard's leading research centre on the internet and society. Co-founded with Charles Nesson. Faculty director since founding. Has produced landmark research on platform governance, privacy, misinformation, AI ethics, and internet censorship, and trained hundreds of fellows who now shape internet policy globally.

cyber.harvard.edu

Caselaw Access Project

Championed ~2015–2018

A Harvard Law School initiative to digitize and freely publish the full corpus of US case law—approximately 40 million pages of decisions dating from the 1600s to 2018—in partnership with Ravel Law. The resulting dataset, deposited openly online, dramatically expanded free public access to American legal precedent.

case.law

Assembly Program

Established at BKC

A three-track fellowship program at the Berkman Klein Center that convenes cohorts of experts, professionals, and students to develop concrete solutions to complex technology policy problems—currently covering cybersecurity, AI governance, and online disinformation. Distinct from the standard academic fellowship model in its emphasis on actionable output.

H2O / Open Casebook

Founded early 2000s

An open-source platform for creating and sharing annotated, re-mixable legal course materials—developed by Zittrain to replace expensive proprietary casebooks, making law school curricula freely accessible and adaptable. Used by law professors at hundreds of institutions worldwide.

opencasebook.org

Institute for Rebooting Social Media

BKC initiative

A Berkman Klein research initiative studying misinformation, privacy, harassment, and content governance on social media platforms—exploring structural interventions and policy alternatives to the current advertising-driven, engagement-maximizing model.

Scholarship and Ideas

Beyond generativity, Zittrain has contributed several influential ideas to the scholarship of internet governance and technology policy. His 2014 essay "Engineering an Election" in the Harvard Law Review Forum examined how internet platform companies—specifically Google—could, through subtle adjustments to their products, tip electoral outcomes without users being aware of it, raising questions about the governance obligations of technology intermediaries that remain highly contested. His concept of "information fiduciaries"—explored in a conversation with Mark Zuckerberg and developed in subsequent academic writing—proposes that companies that collect and profit from personal data should be held to fiduciary duties of loyalty to their users, similar to the duties lawyers and doctors owe their clients and patients, rather than having essentially unlimited discretion to use that data as they see fit. His co-authored 2016 Berkman report Don't Panic: Making Progress on the "Going Dark" Debate (with Bruce Schneier and others) offered a measured, technically informed counterpoint to law enforcement arguments for mandatory encryption backdoors. His work on AI governance frames the challenge as designing accountability structures for "opaque complex adaptive systems"—AI models whose outputs cannot be fully predicted or explained even by their builders.

Current Activities

Zittrain's current research centers on the ethics and governance of artificial intelligence, and in particular on the difficulties of holding AI systems and their developers accountable when the systems' behavior is emergent rather than explicitly programmed. He continues as faculty director of the Berkman Klein Center and the Harvard Law School Library, as faculty director of the Assembly Program, and as a member of the EFF board. He remains one of the most in-demand public commentators on technology policy, regularly contributing to media coverage of platform regulation, AI governance, and the governance of speech online. He continues to teach cyberlaw at Harvard and advises policymakers on both the technical and normative dimensions of technology regulation. His personal website, hosted at Harvard's Berkman infrastructure, collects his publications, essays, and talks at jz.cyber.harvard.edu.

Jonathan L. Zittrain
George Bemis Professor of International Law
Harvard Law School, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

Concurrent appointments: Professor of Public Policy (Kennedy School) · Professor of Computer Science (SEAS) · Faculty Director, Harvard Law School Library

Key affiliation: Co-Founder and Faculty Director, Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society

Personal website: jz.cyber.harvard.edu  |  Harvard faculty page: hls.harvard.edu

Berkman Klein Center: cyber.harvard.edu/people/jzittrain

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