Joking aside what exactly is net neutrality?

To understand the concept of net neutrality you first have to understand the backdrop of the Internet itself, says Jonathan Zittrain who heads the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.

“The Internet is kind of a collective hallucination. It is only a set of protocols that say if somebody joining this network, connecting however it can, speaks those protocols, it’s a full-fledged member of the network. That’s one reason why the Internet has no main menu, it has no CEO, it has no business plan,” says Zittrain.

via Is the Internet equal around the world? | Public Radio International.

But if Obamacare for the internet isn’t a particularly meaningful concept, a public option for the internet is. Susan Crawford, the John A. Reilly Visiting Professor in Intellectual Property at the Harvard Law School, explained the idea to me in an interview:

via There’s no Obamacare for the internet. But there could be a public option. – Vox.

Harvard Law School visiting Professor Susan Crawford spoke with Morning Edition host Bob Seay about Net Neutrality saying the momentum behind the issue and President Obama’s recent support demonstrates the need to give oversight to the Internet.  Crawford says,  “Net Neutrality isn’t about the cars on the Super information Highway or the Internet, it’s about the roads.”

via Harvard Prof Says Net Neutrality Gives Internet Oversight | WGBH News.

“A lawsuit is an awful way to sort out a situation like this one,” Computer Science and Law Professor Jonathan L. Zittrain wrote in an email Monday to The Crimson, adding that “there may be reasons to rethink how studies of this sort are done—who approves them, and who’s informed about it before, during, and after —but I don’t see any useful role for a lawsuit here, and I suspect the plaintiff’s firm is rather hoping to simply settle, banking on the University not wishing ongoing bad publicity.”

via Bol Notifies Students Affected by Controversial Attendance Study | News | The Harvard Crimson.

Bruce Schneier, noted author, cryptologist, and fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Security and Harvard Law School, gives his take on President Obama’s recent statement on net neutrality and explains why encryption is vital to personal security and privacy.

via Bruce Schneier says ‘Encryption makes internet safer’, Celente on the economy — RT Boom Bust.

Reynol Junco of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard said social media has “definite positive effects if it is used in an educational way; positive and negative if the kids are left to their own devices.” He advocated for pulling social networks into the educational curriculum, while also warning that playing games through social media was largely a negative experience for kids.

via Is your kid ADDICTED to web porn? Twitter? Hint: Don’t blame the internet • The Register.

Options for an American right to be forgotten are beginning to emerge. Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, says focusing on search engines “allows for the information itself to remain public, with a question of how to narrow the indexing of it.” He also praised an experiment launched by Google years ago, allowing people quoted or mentioned in a news article to append a clarifying comment next to the article on the Google News service. The function doesn’t appear to be available any longer.

via Fighting for the right to be forgotten on the Web – LA Times.

Justin Reich, a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, said the potential for a major cyber-attack is real, but the prospect of retaliation is one reason they have not occurred.“It hasn’t happened because mutually assured destruction works, or at least it has for 70 years,” Reich said.

via Cyber-attack causing ‘widespread harm’ expected by 2025.

In an expansive conversation about privacy and rebuilding trust in technology after revelations of widespread government spying, Smith talked about Microsoft’s first “sea-change” moment. It came in the year after the September 2001 terrorist attacks, when Microsoft, among other Internet companies and telcos, was asked to voluntarily share data with U.S. law enforcement.

In the heat of the moment, in 2002, “it was easy to do things that we wouldn’t otherwise do,” Smith told Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of law and computer science at Harvard who moderated the event.

via Microsoft’s top legal gun decries privacy ‘arms race’ | Computerworld.

In other words, to paraphrase Harvard professor Jonathan Zittrain, the 2000 presidential election—where George W. Bush won Florida by 537 votes—could have been altered by a Facebook election button.

But in order to do these kinds of experiments, Facebook has to create a control group—which means only showing the button to some users, and not to others. In 2012, Facebook said that it would make the button available to every user, as a kind-hearted effort to increase voting all around. Except that it never actually did, and instead continued the testing. As revealed by Micah Sifry in a feature at Mother Jones last week, the 2012 election button played host to many experiments:

via How Facebook Could Skew an Election – The Atlantic.