Father of the Net adopts practical view of his child's future

Dr Vint Cerf is happy to admit when he began working on the development of the internet, he had no idea how big it would become, writes Jamie Smyth.

Dr Vint Cerf is known by many net observers as the "father of the internet". The 59-year-old co-developed the transmission control protocol/internet protocol (TCP/IP) - the technology that enables computers to talk to one another and which led to the development of the internet.

This protocol defines the format of Net data packets and how they get to their destination on the internet. Dr Cerf, who was awarded the presidential medal of honour for his work, developed the protocol with the help of Dr Robert Kahn in the 1970s and 1980s.

Currently senior vice-president of technology and internet infrastructure at MCI, Mr Cerf's work enabled the firm to persuade the US government to enable it to link its MCI mail service to the internet in the early 1990s. This achievement helped the internet to develop from its roots as a military and academic medium to a fully commercial vehicle.

Dr Cerf is chairman of the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) - an independent body that administers the internet's most basic function - the names and numbers that identify computers to each other.

In this position he has recently staunchly defended the organisation against claims of administrative secrecy and neglecting the developing world in formulating policy at the World Summit on the Information Society.

Dr Cerf has varied interests in the technology field and is working on an interplanetary communications medium that will help scientists explore the solar system.

He grew up just north of Los Angeles and attended UCLA with other founders of the internet including Jon Postel and Stephen Crocker.

Dr Cerf is hearing-impaired and has worn a hearing aid for many years. His wife Sigrid, with whom he lives in Northern Virginia, was profoundly deaf until 1996 when she received a Cochlear implant.

Below are some of his thoughts on recent trends in the technology world.

When did you first realise that the internet would be a big thing?

Certainly not in 1973 when Bob Kahn and I were writing the first specifications of the TCP/IP communications protocol. We didn't even know if the technology would work.

My first real sense that this thing was going to take off was in 1988, when I walked into the Interop show in 1988 in Los Angeles. Some of the exhibits were two-stories high and each cost between $250,000 (€196,000) and $500,000. I remember thinking "holy cow" obviously a bunch of people think there is a business to be had from the Net.

At that point, the internet was not even allowed to be commercially used. That moment triggered my action to get permission from the government to hook up MCI mail to the internet to create a commercial email service to break any policy barriers there might be to commercial access to the internet backbone.

What legislation is needed to help the internet develop?

Whatever you see on the Net and whatever you don't like is a reflection of what is common in the rest of society. People think of the Net as a kind of a mirror of our social and economic vision.

People abuse the network, they commit fraud with it, or send spam, they do many things and there are attempts to legislate against that. Passing a law doesn't necessarily mean that there will be enforcement, but it may provide some leverage to someone who has the ability to enforce better behaviour.

So some of the anti-spam and consumer protection legislation is going to be helpful to disciplining the use of the network.

Will the anonymity offered by the internet protect spammers?

I think the spammers may be able to hide technologically but they will not be able to hide in other ways. Regardless of whether the spammer succeeds in injecting traffic in an anonymous way on the Net, there may be other ways of finding them.

The spammer who is making a business out of spam ultimately has to be found because he doesn't have a business unless people can find him and pay him.

Are biometric technologies infringing our civil rights?

I think many people feel that civil liberties have already been infringed in the US. There is a very interesting pendulum that swings back and forth between privacy and protecting society.

As a person who feels like a law-abiding citizen, I don't mind the fact that my fingerprints will be taken. And I don't feel too upset with that particular practice on the grounds that we have a bad track record of understanding where people go when they enter the US on a temporary visa.

Is the internet yet a trusted way of doing business?

I don't think the experience level is sufficient yet to have achieved comfort in Europe. But in the US I think most of the early concerns about credit card fraud have dissipated. This will eventually occur in Europe as well.

But the biggest values in terms of transactions will not be individual consumers but rather businesses exchanging and confirming orders and invoices back and forth over the Net.

Do you accept the recent criticism of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers at the World Summit on the Information Society by developing countries?

Those assertions I find almost incredible because the governmental advisory committee that was formed when ICANN was created has openly attempted to get the developing countries to participate in that committee.

So there is a platform for the developing countries to participate in ICANN's policy making and the fact that they have not done so is a puzzle for me.

I think the developing countries have not availed themselves of the opportunity. I suspect, though I do not have proof, that part of this problem is that the parties that participated in the world summit are not the same parties in the government that are aware of how ICANN works.

Is ICANN too secret an organisation?

I don't know of any organisation that is more open than ICANN, all of our documentation is on the Web. We have public meetings, we post the transcript of those meetings in real time so people who are not present can follow what is going on. We publish all of our documents for public comment before we make any policy decisions. All of our financial information is on the Net.

I would argue there are countless organisations that have far less information publicly available on the Web. So I take umbrage at the argument that we do things in secrecy.

It's been a pretty tumultuous year for MCI, are you confident that MCI will be able to rise out of bankruptcy protection?

Yes. Part of the reason for that is Michael Capellas, who is a perfect choice to lead the company at this time due to his technological background.

He had been a chief information officer at Compaq and bits and bytes are in his blood so he is aware of the fact that the historical telecoms business model is changing.

We will focus a lot on managed services, where the services being managed include computing systems, applications that are running on them.

So we are opening up a much larger world of services than we ever had before. So, in some sense, our future looks brighter than it did even before the bankruptcy happened.

You also work at US Jet Propulsion Laboratory? What do you do?

The work that I and my colleagues have been doing for the last five years is aimed directly at networking of the robotic assets in the solar system. This new communications platform should enable us to support a much more intensive and long-life exploration of the solar system.

The two lowest layers of the interplanetary internet protocol are actually already on board the current Mars lander Spirit. We are hoping that by 2009 we will have an orbiter around Mars that can carry a full suite of internet interplanetary protocols. And, by the end of the decade, I hope to have the ability to demonstrate a two planet internet - the whole point of which is to allow research scientists here on earth to interact directly with Mars.

What technology has been most important in your life?

I've been wearing hearing aids for 37 years and they have enabled me to be functional in the hearing world.

My wife lost her hearing when she was three years old and went profoundly deaf. But in 1996 she had a cochlear implant - a spectacular piece of technology which interfaces a computer to the auditory nerve. This computer directly stimulates the auditory nerve with the electrical impulses, which simulate what the inner ear nerves would have done if they worked.

It is almost impossible to overstate the impact of this capability. She now does everything that any other hearing person does thanks to this technology.

What technologies will define the 21st century?

I think neural electronics will be important. The cochlear implant is one example of this and we may even see sensory motor implants for spinal cord injuries, although this may take up to 20 years to happen.

We will probably see serious efforts towards a hydrogen economy, although how far into the future is not clear.

We all know we will run out of petroleum resources at some point but the the pressure to create an alternative resource industry may not be high enough for 150 years.

We will probably see a resurgence of nuclear power as an alternative.

The great concerns that the public have about this technology can be addressed by proper design of the facilities.

There will also be much more appliances networked around the typical house that will all be controlled by a single PDA-type device.

It is this ability to consolidate that is exciting for me.