Jonathan Zittrain - Agenda Setters 2008

Name: Jonathan Zittrain

Title: Cyber scholar

Position: 49    Last year: Not ranked

Why? Predicting the future of the internet

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• Dan Nye
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• Robin Li

As cyber law professor at the University of Oxford, Jonathan Zittrain's expertise and razor-sharp insight has established him as an authority on the future of the internet.

He burst into the limelight in 2008 with his book The Future of the Internet And How to Stop It, which posed difficult questions about how society will manage the explosion of online security threats and the growing challenge to the web's freedoms from locked-down networks such as Microsoft's Xbox Live.

An Agenda Setters judge described Zittrain as "a brilliant lecturer on the possible futures of the internet and society".

With more and more business and everyday life conducted online, Zittrain's insights become ever more important to the shape of the future.

Zittrain came to Oxford from the Harvard Law School, where he was the Jack N and Lillian R Berkman assistant professor for entrepreneurial legal studies - and holds degrees in both law and artificial intelligence.