Vint Cerf
Vint Cerf
Vinton Gray Cerf ForMemRS,is an American Internet pioneer, who is recognized as one of "the fathers of the Internet", sharing this title with TCP/IP co-inventor Bob Kahn and packet switching inventors Paul Baran and Donald Davies, among others. His contributions have been acknowledged and lauded, repeatedly, with honorary degrees and awards that include the National Medal of Technology, the Turing Award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Marconi Prize and membership in the National Academy of Engineering...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth23 June 1943
CountryUnited States of America
There is a high bar for something to be considered a human right. Loosely put, it must be among the things we as humans need in order to lead healthy, meaningful lives, like freedom from torture or freedom of conscience.
Sorting through what social conventions we ought to adopt for the Internet is a pretty tricky and complicated topic. I think we are just going to live through a lot of these issues until we discover what social norms make sense.
One thing that I can tell you that we have not done very well is to build in broadcast capability into the network, and we don't take advantage of broadcast radio.
Henry Kissinger once told me he was very concerned about the Internet's impact on people's ability to absorb information in a concentrated way, because we've become accustomed to looking up something, getting a snippet and being satisfied with that - as opposed to reading through and considering a weighty tome that goes into great depth.
Free is not going to go away. Either the advertising model will still work, or there will still be literally hundreds of millions of people who want to put their information on the Net and want people to have access to it.
While the United States has never decreed that everyone has a 'right' to a telephone, we have come close to this with the notion of 'universal service' - the idea that telephone service (and electricity, and now broadband Internet) must be available, even in the most remote regions of the country.
Internet and government is Topic A in every nation, all around the world. There is the question of getting the Internet built. That involves persuading government to have regulatory policies. It involves new technology to bring the Internet to rural places.
Given that my title at Google is Chief Internet Evangelist, I feel like there is this great challenge before me because we have three billion users, and there are seven billion people in the world.
Choosing a single most important development is incredibly hard to do because a lot of different things had to happen before the Internet could be deployed in the fashion it is today.
By 1988, I'm seeing this commercial phenomenon beginning to show up. Hardware makers are selling routers to universities so they can build up their campus networks. So I remember thinking, 'Well, how are we going to get this in the hands of the general public?' There were no public Internet services at that point.
Will we shoot virtually at each other over the Internet? Probably not. On the other hand, there may be wars fought about the Internet.
The first commercial routers came out about 1986, and services came in 1987.
The big deal about the Internet design was you could have an arbitrary large number of networks so that they would all work together.
It seems pretty clear that the Internet has an important economic role to play for China as it reaches out to the rest of the world.