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
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.
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.
People are concerned because they don't know what the agreements that NSI and the government came to are,
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
You don't have to know how to build an automobile or a television set or a laptop to know how to use it.