Vint Cerf Quotations

The Internet is brittle and fragile and too easy to take down. It's a conduit for criminal activity. We need international treaties to prosecute the bad guys, but we don't have them.

Remember, 'governance' is a big word that includes human rights, freedom of speech, economic transactions on a worldwide basis - it touches everything. It's everywhere, and that's why Internet governance is Topic A in many corners.

There is an odd mix of permeability and impermeability in the Net. You won't be able to communicate with everyone, and not every application will be accessible to everyone.

One of my favorite books is 'The Swiss Family Robinson.' The reason is, I'm fascinated by the postapocalyptic recovery. What do we do in a disaster? How do we make do?

History is rife with examples of governments taking actions to 'protect' their citizens from harm by controlling access to information and inhibiting freedom of expression and other freedoms outlined in The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We must make sure, collectively, that the Internet avoids a similar fate.

It's the Industrial Revolution and the growth of urban concentrations that led to a sense of anonymity.

The Internet has introduced an enormously accessible and egalitarian platform for creating, sharing and obtaining information on a global scale. As a result, we have new ways to allow people to exercise their human and civil rights.

The post office doesn't guarantee delivery, but it tries really hard. It's called best efforts communication. If you put two postcards in the post-box, they don't necessarily come out then in the same order that you put them in. So, that means that there's potentially disorder with your delivery, and that's also true in the Internet.

I am annoyed by people that send messages via FaceBook because I get an e-mail telling me there is a message on FaceBook - so I end up processing two messages for every one sent.

Allowing a handful of broadband carriers to determine what people see and do online would fundamentally undermine the features that have made the Internet such a success, and could permanently compromise the Internet as a platform for the free exchange of information, commerce, and ideas.

There's nothing special about wireless networks except that wireless capacity is sometimes less than what you can get, for example, from optical fiber.

We've never lived in an environment in which it has been so easy to capture information and share it. That fact that it is digital and easy to transmit exacerbates that. I don't know that we know yet what social norms we wish to adopt.

The more we can organize, find and manage information, the more effectively we can function in our modern world.

In the earliest days, this was a project I worked on with great passion because I wanted to solve the Defense Department's problem: it did not want proprietary networking and it didn't want to be confined to a single network technology.

We have already discovered how quickly we become dependent on the Internet and its applications for business, government and research, so it is not surprising that we are finding that we can apply this technology to enable or facilitate our social interactions as well.

Commercialization of assets off the planet would mutually reinforce the growth of interplanetary communication.

Yet in all those cases I finally steeled myself to seize the opportunity, and find a way to muddle through and eventually conclude that I had, in fact, chosen the right path, as risky as it seemed at the time.

To be honest, I joined Facebook as an experiment. I accepted all invitations just to see how many people would ask to be 'friends' - it quickly overwhelmed my time to process even the invitations and requests, let alone to actually go there and do anything.

The internet has become one of the motors of the 21st century economy, allowing all of us to reach a global audience at a click of a mouse and creating hundreds of thousands of businesses and millions of jobs.

The Internet of Things tell us that a lot of computer-enabled appliances and devices are going to become part of this system, too: appliances that you use around the house, that you use in your office, that you carry around with yourself or in the car. That's the Internet of Things that's coming.

Writing software is a very intense, very personal thing. You have to have time to work your way through it, to understand it. Then debug it.

For systems in which you already have a lot of hardware and software, change is difficult. That's why apps are so popular.

I used to tell jokes about Internet-enabled lightbulbs. I can't tell jokes about it anymore - there already is an Internet-connected lightbulb.

I wore a coat and tie all through high school: my way of being rebellious in the late 1950s.

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.

The big deal about the Internet design was you could have an arbitrary large number of networks so that they would all work together.

The first commercial routers came out about 1986, and services came in 1987.

Will we shoot virtually at each other over the Internet? Probably not. On the other hand, there may be wars fought about the Internet.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I want more Internet. I want every one of the 6 billion people on the planet to be able to connect to the Internet - I think they will add things to it that will really benefit us all.

The bottom-up, loosely-coupled, bilateral and multi-stakeholder practices that have created the network of networks we call the Internet allow for a broad range of business models.

There needs to be some regime that is overseeing access to broadband to make sure we have openess; otherwise, there is a risk it won't be open anymore. We spent quite a bit of time with Verizon policy people in addition to participating in a multilateral discussion with the Federal Communications Commission.

While many governments are committed to maintaining flexible regimes for fast-moving Internet technologies, some others have been quite explicit about their desire to put a single U.N. or other intergovernmental body in control of the Net.

At the roots, people are still people. That's why Shakespeare is so popular no matter what the language.

The net's future is far from assured, and history offers much warning. Within a few decades of Gutenberg's creation, princes and priests moved to restrict the right to print books.

You don't have to be young to learn about technology. You have to feel young.

Governments should look at investment in broadband as a national priority on the grounds that having broadband access for virtually everyone creates opportunities for the development of the economy that wouldn't otherwise be available.

I think exploring the Internet's - and the Web's - ability to facilitate personal linkages is remarkable; and expect to see additional social networking applications and services emerge.

One thing we know for sure is that the Web is a collaborative medium unlike any we've ever had before. We see people working together, playing together, interacting in social settings using these media. We hope that will emerge as the new tool for education.

With Internet technology you can capture a photo, a quote, or an article, store it locally and upload it into the Net more than once, if you wish, to multiple sites. Can you imagine then forcing the search engines to somehow not index that information?

The Internet browser is the most susceptible to viruses. The browser is naive about downloading and executing software. Google is trying to help by releasing the Chrome browser as open source.

Energy, health care and education are just three examples of areas in which information and information management are critically important. How are we using our energy? What appliances in homes or business are consuming the most energy? When do they consume it? Can the load be shifted? How efficient are these devices?

Some people argue we should solve all the problems on Earth before going off the planet, but that's like telling Lewis and Clark to stay put until the rest of the East was settled. No way.

The idea that you can somehow erase the Internet is silly.

Google Apps for Education is a suite of applications intended to be helpful to higher level educational institutions, but in the long run, I think Google has a role to play in helping to assemble relevant content for classroom use.

I can't say I'm particularly happy about all the spam and the viruses and the equivalent that we see on the Net, but I think technology can deal with many of the problems that we're now seeing, whether it's filtering or whatever, and laws may help a lot.

Improving the Internet is just one means, albeit an important one, by which to improve the human condition. It must be done with an appreciation for the civil and human rights that deserve protection - without pretending that access itself is such a right.

Several authoritarian regimes reportedly propose to ban anonymity from the web, making it easier to find and arrest dissidents. At Google, we see and feel the dangers of the government-led net crackdown. We operate in about 150 countries around the globe.

When I first joined Google in October of 2005, I was warned that I shouldn't be offended if people were doing their e-mails while a meeting was going on.

Yet we still see continuous reports of bugs.

I just am a huge cheerleader for getting kids interested in science and technology.

In 1973, the only cryptographic technology we could get our hands on was classified.

It doesn't matter if it's a wireless or wired network. I think network management can be introduced that is equally sensible.

It's important that the adults appreciate that young people are capable of doing really astounding work.

The Internet is literally a network of networks.

We all know the Internet didn't explode until it became a commercial enterprise. Space communication will probably have the same characteristic.

You don't have to know how to build an automobile or a television set or a laptop to know how to use it.

Although the FCC has tried to introduce net neutrality rules to avoid abusive practices like favoring your own services over others, they have struggled because there has been more than one court case in which it was asserted the FCC didn't have the authority to punish ISPs for abusing their control over the broadband channel.

The idea that Google, Yahoo, and eBay are getting a free ride is absolutely unfair criticism. We have to build out our own infrastructure. And we have to inter-connect to the public Internet.

The immediacy of the mobile changes it from what we're accustomed to in the personal computing world to something that's instantaneous... What's interesting and powerful about the mobile environment is that it's connected to services on the Internet. This augments both platforms.

The Internet is a really big tent. In theory, it can support the full range of models, one of which is, 'Here's my information and I'm happy you can use it,' and the other one is, 'Here's the information and you can't have it unless you pay me for it,' and perhaps some things in-between. There is a full spectrum of models.

When I joined Google, they asked me what title I wanted. I said, 'What about archduke?' They said, 'Well, that didn't meet our nomenclature. Why don't you be our Chief Internet Evangelist?' This was in 2005.

You should know that I've been hearing-impaired, not quite since birth, but I've been wearing hearing aids since I was 13, so I'm very conscious of the difficulty of voice communication.

It may seem like sort of a waste of time to play 'World of Warcraft' with your son. But you're actually interacting with each other. You're solving problems. They may seem like simple problems, but you're solving them. You're posed with challenges that you have to overcome. You're on a quest to gain certain capabilities.

Like almost every major infrastructure, the Internet can be abused and its users harmed. We must, however, take great care that the cure for these ills does not do more harm than good. The benefits of the open and accessible Internet are nearly incalculable, and their loss would wreak significant social and economic damage.

No matter what you do, any country in the world is going to have the ability to set its own rules internally. Any country in the world can pull the plug. It's not a question of technical issues, it's not a question of right or wrong, it's not a question of whether global Internet governance is right or wrong. It's just with us.

The government has a responsibility to protect society, to help maintain society. That's why we have laws... The rule of law creates a set of standards for our behavior.

The idea was that you could grow a system like the Internet one network at a time and then interconnect them. In some sense, the most important thing was the invention of the architecture protocols that enabled the Internet.

The three-piece suit has become sort of my trademark. You don't see them much anymore. It has several benefits: You may be overdressed on some occasions, but you can manage to fit into a huge range of circumstances.

There is a project that's underway called the interplanetary Internet. It's in operation between Earth and Mars. It's operating on the International Space Station. It's part of the spacecraft that's in orbit around the Sun that's rendezvoused with two planets.

Virtually any appliance is going to be online. Appliances will talk to each other and to the power-generation system. Our appliances will pay attention to our preferences.

What would happen if our clothes were Internet-enabled? Can you imagine if you lost a sock? You could send out a search, and sock No. 3117 would respond that it's under the couch in the living room.

When I helped to develop the open standards that computers use to communicate with one another across the Net, I hoped for but could not predict how it would blossom and how much human ingenuity it would unleash.

We're not confident that the funds will be made available and we don't want to rely on them, ... The GIP decided we should provide some certainty.

Global standards and interoperability are very powerful concepts. They drove the Internet, and they could drive the development of RFID. If we have a lot of incompatible things, their value will drop significantly.

People are concerned because they don't know what the agreements that NSI and the government came to are,

Some of us feel NAT boxes are sort of an abomination because they really do mess about with the basic protocol architecture of the Internet.

I wish we were getting a handle on this problem, but I think it's pretty substantial. There's an uneasy feeling that going online is risky.

Why would they be soliciting the opinion of a pun writer about this?

We risk losing the Internet as a catalyst for consumer choice, for economic growth, for technological innovation and for global competitiveness.

It would be a mistake to think that because a particular technology can be used to distribute illegal copies therefore you should just run away from it.

Companies that rely on the Internet for their business models should be contributing to guarantee that the Internet remains stable,

You simply can't keep up with the technology, ... so the laws won't apply.

This doesn't constitute, in my mind, a competitive environment.

It probably doesn't hurt to have a few gray hairs around the building. I'm very much excited about working with young people because they don't know they can't do certain things, which can be helpful.

It's important for users to understand what risks they face and try to help them identify which software is likely to be problematic.

In 1970, there was a single telephone company in the United States called AT&T, and its technology was called circuit switching, and that was all any telecom engineer worried about.

In a town of 3,000 people, there is no privacy. Everybody knows what everybody is doing.

In the absence of any meaningful competition in the consumer broadband market, and without?consumer safeguards, one would expect carriers to have the economic incentive -- and the opportunity -- to control users' online activities.

For the last decade, we have been amazed and delighted by what we can do online. And yet people feel increasingly powerless to stop unscrupulous individuals and companies from infecting their computers with programs that they didn't request. The providers of Internet services and software simply must get this problem under control so the users can realize the full potential of their access to the Internet.

This is mostly a highlighting and warning and education project.