Jonathan Zittrain Quotes

The early idealists and companies and governments have all assumed that the Internet will bring freedom. Yet China proves that this is not the case.

With the Internet, information is knowledge and knowledge is freedom.

There's a fundamental difference between people who want to see the Internet and say - 'Let's lobotomize and censor parts of it because we need to control it' - and those like us who see the Internet as a method of growing the economy and innovating in front of the world. And we have to actually reconcile those two positions. And we believe that it is much better to protect this crown jewel of civilization, which is the ability for us to communicate and express our ideas freely, than to try to lobotomize it.

Even with censorship, the Internet is a force for change.

There is clearly a constituency that appreciates the message that Google is sending, that it finds the Chinese government's attitude to the Internet and censorship unacceptable.

There are a lot of people that think the Internet is going to bring information and democracy and pluralism in China just by existing.

I come from the school who thought the Internet could be the great democratising force, that getting rid of the gatekeepers was a positive move.

In cyberspace, once privacy is breached, it may be breached worldwide. Free speech is not restricted to a street-corner audience, a locker room, or a limited-circulation publication, but travels the world.

I have worked on open Internet, speech, and entrepreneurship issues for years.

One of the great debates about the Internet is whether it is making people more or less free.

We have to start thinking of ourselves as citizens of the Internet, not just passive users. I don't see how we can bring about change in our digital lives if we don't take responsibility.

Only about 10 percent of India's population uses the web, making it unlikely that Internet freedom will be a decisive ballot-box issue anytime soon.

I think we should not control the Internet.

Google has withdrawn from China, arguing that it is no longer willing to design its search engine to block information that the Chinese government does not wish its citizens to have. In liberal democracies around the world, this decision has generally been greeted with enthusiasm.

As a society, we haven't spent as much time building the citizen Internet.

The Internet has exceeded our collective expectations as a revolutionary spring of information, news, and ideas. It is essential that we keep that spring flowing. We must not thwart the Internet's availability by taxing access to it.

The thing I have come to find astonishing is that people from all political sides routinely say that the Internet has to be the model of free speech and freedom.

Calling China's online censorship system a 'Great Firewall' is increasingly trendy, but misleading. All walls, being the creation of engineers, can be breached with the right tools.

The web's democratic in one way and distinctly undemocratic in another way. And I think a lot of the confusion about the political ramifications have to do with that one word having so many meanings. So, it's democratic in that it quite literally delivers power to the people; it, it essentially opens up participation in the public's mind.

I am in favor of complete freedom of information and of free access to the new communication tools, in particular the Internet.

There's a real contradiction that's difficult to explain to the West and the outside world about China and about the Internet.

The user in China wants the same thing that any Internet user wants - privacy in conversations, maximum access to information, and the ability to speak their minds online.

Every year in China, Internet executives are officially rewarded for their 'patriotism.'

Disclosure and transparency are the currency of the Internet, and they are at odds with authoritarianism.

Like it or not, Google and the Chinese government are stuck in a tense, long-term relationship, and can look forward to more high-stakes shadow-boxing in the netherworld of the world's most elaborate system of censorship.