Author Archive for jonathan-zittrain
Mentioning someone by name on a web site
posted by Jonathan Zittrain
Colleague Karen McCullagh has pointed out a decision from the European Court of Justice that appears to suggest that the inclusion of identifiable personal data on a personal web page could run afoul of the European data directive.
From her description, drawing from the Court’s facts of the case:
July 19, 2007 at 5:28 pm
Posted in: Privacy
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“Keep the core neutral”
posted by Jonathan Zittrain
Internet founding parent David Clark was a guest in my cyberlaw class in the fall of 1997. We talked about Internet governance, although I don’t think anyone (including us) called it that yet. ICANN wasn’t a gleam in the U.S. Department of Commerce’s eye, but even then the amazing state of the domain name system — how it came into being, how it was managed — made for an extraodinary story.
Now lawyers and diplomats are all over the subject, and ICANN has ballooned into a multi-million dollar organization. I’ve argued elsewhere that arguments about ICANN and domain names don’t much matter except to those who want a piece of the financial pie, and I think predictions of domain names’ unimportance have largely proven true. Sure, IBM would not be happy if it lost ibm.com, but it’s at no risk of having that happen, and the fact is that most people find things by Googling them than by entering a domain name. So long as search engines can crawl to various destinations, a world in which we couldn’t use mnemonic domain names wouldn’t be much different than the one we have now.
With that background, I’ve been thinking about the global petition to “keep the core neutral” signed by fellow travelers like Wendy Seltzer, Larry Lessig, and David Post. Is it something worth signing?
July 5, 2007 at 5:59 pm
Posted in: Technology
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The End of Email
posted by Jonathan Zittrain
Like others, in the past week I’ve noticed a major uptick in the spam I receive on longstanding email addresses. It’s gotten to the point where I’ve configured Gmail to scoop up the mail from those boxes so it can do its own junk mail sorting, and then I POP the mail into my Eudora client from Gmail. It’s taken me from downloading email where more than 9 out of 10 are spam to fewer than 1 out of 10 as spam — with the spam sitting harmlessly on Gmail.
But this is a good time to point out something beyond the cat-and-mouse of spam-and-filter: email is dying.
July 4, 2007 at 5:10 pm
Posted in: Technology
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