Brief

Evangelizing the Internet

Vinton Cerf likes to call himself an Internet evangelist. One of the founding fathers of the Internet, Cerf has been instrumental in creating the Web, although it has grown beyond his imagination

Vinton Cerf

Speaking to Express Computer about the Web, Vinton Cerf said, “The Internet is not a magic wand to wipe out poverty, but it can show results if properly used.

“It has facilitated the growth of the outsourcing industry in India. Likewise it can help farmers get a better price for their produce by alerting them about price fluctuations in the market, but India needs to significantly improve its broadband connectivity to rural areas.”

According to Cerf, mobile phone growth in Indian could be a huge factor in terms of Internet growth in future. Though to a large extent mobiles in India are largely voice-based, they can be upgraded to support the Internet.

Vinton Cerf while working as a professor at Stanford University performed some of the earliest work on the TCP/IP protocols. During that time, he and Robert Kahn, who had worked together on ARPANET, the first packet-switched network, began thinking about how to connect various networks into a large one. They were reunited in 1976 at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to do just that.

Cerf is a strong advocate for the adoption of the next generation of the Internet Protocol, IPv6, to replace IPv4. Ipv4 dates back to the 1980s. Roughly two-thirds of the currently available 4.3 billion IPv4 addresses are already in use. The IPv6 architecture could increase the number of available addresses to 85,000 trillion.

“I’m still a strong proponent of IPv6, although network address translation has helped overcome IPv4 address scarcity, there is no doubt that if we continue at our current rate we will [eventually] run out of IP addresses,” Cerf said. According to him, the multitude of mobiles now in use, plus the growing adoption of the Internet in Asia, could pose a risk to the smooth running of the Net unless IPv6 is adopted.

Cerf along with Robert Kahn has received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from United States’ President George W Bush (the highest civilian award in the US). He also pioneered commercial e-mail service at MCI. He joined the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (which oversees Net addresses) and seemingly remains in awe of current technology.

Cerf is currently working with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab to standardize deep-space communications protocols between Earth and Mars. “Interplanetary Internet” would make it possible for various computer systems in space, from old and new missions, to interact and use each other’s data, said Cerf as he signed off. This might have interesting implications for the future of the Web. Could the next Internet be the Solar Wide Web instead of World Wide Web? Only the future will tell.

—Viswanath Pilla