Cerf’s up

In an exclusive interview, Vint Cerf explains why information infrastructure reform is just as important as physical gains.

Widely thought of as the father of the internet, Vint Cerf’s contributions to the world wide web have been recognized repeatedly, with honorary degrees and awards that include the National Medal of Technology and the Turing Award. But his most notable recognition came in 2005, when, alongside research partner Robert Kahn, Cerf received the highest civilian honor that can be bestowed in the US, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. To put Cerf’s (and Kahn’s) achievements in perspective, they are not only responsible for the design of the TCP/IP protocol that governs data transfer across the net, but also much of the internet’s fundamental architecture. Becoming recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom marked both Cerf and Kahn “at the forefront of a digital revolution that has transformed global commerce, communication and entertainment.” In other words, Vint Cerf is as close as you can get to internet royalty.

“I’m not the only father of the internet,” he says, reluctant to accept such an eponymous title. “There are lots of people who’ve contributed. This is very much a collaborative effort, and if you look at the history of the internet, you’ll find that literally thousands of people have contributed over the years: tens of thousands – maybe by this time hundreds of thousands. This is one of those wonderful ideas where everyone has an opportunity to contribute, and they do. And that’s the real magic and power of the internet. It’s an open environment that everyone has an opportunity to share in and to contribute to, and that’s exactly what’s happening.”

Indeed, the idea of openness and collaboration – and of sustaining the internet as an open network for consumer choice and innovation – is a subject close to Cerf’s heart. “Google believes in a very open internet environment,” he explains. “One where everyone has the opportunity to try out new products and services without discrimination. We also believe that you have a right to know exactly what you are getting. Suppliers of internet service need to be clear about expected performance and what you are paying them for.”

In Cerf’s view, the internet should be an egalitarian entity used by anyone and everyone, one where suppliers of the service are unable to discriminate against a user merely because of who or where that user is. “We are arguing that the internet should be nondiscriminatory in terms of its access, although we accept the argument that for larger capacity you may have to pay more,” he says. “What we are after is an open environment where both consumers and suppliers of applications are treated fairly.”

He likens the shared asset of the internet to a road system – everyone driving on it with the roads being used simultaneously by lots of different users. This is exactly, he explains by example, how packet switching works. “Packet switching may be a way, like the road system, to allow people to share common infrastructure,” says Cerf. “From my point of view, in order to create broadband access there needs to be a financial or other business incentive, whether that’s R&D tax credits or credits related to revenue gained on new investment. If there are ways of providing incentives to businesses for creating openly sharable infrastructures, then that’s a hint of the direction in which one might go in this current climate where at least the present legislation is intending to provide a substantial amount of government support for investment in infrastructure of all kinds.

“Creating incentives for industry and the private sector to build both the underlying infrastructure and then participate in inventing new ways to use it is the direction that we want to be heading in.”

But given the current state of the markets, are companies really in the mood for investment in internet infrastructure? “We have a situation where the incentives for companies providing internet access are distorted by a natural desire to maximise their investment to the detriment of innovation,” concedes Cerf. “I think we need to provide adequate incentives for all parties, those providing underlying facilities and those providing value-added services, to have fair and nondiscriminatory access to the underlying bit-carrying capacity of the internet. Monopolising provision of service does not produce innovation; in fact, it sometimes inhibits it. People want to know why they should invent a new, less expensive solution when they are able to charge more money for their service by sticking with the old way of doing it.”

Cerf instead sees innovation as being paramount to any country’s long-term prospects: “The next question then is, ‘What kind of incentive will be there for creating the appropriate infrastructure?’ And not to over-argue the point here, but as we look at the American situation today, perhaps there is an opportunity because of this financial crisis and resurgence of interest in infrastructure reform to find new ways to invest in internet infrastructure.

“I believe that we need to find ways – through consultations with the regulators, with economists and with business leaders, and maybe even with technologists – to find ways of providing the incentives that will cause this infrastructure to be created and invested in.”

As an example he eludes back to the Depression years in the United States, when Roosevelt deliberately created a massive investment in physical facilities and infrastructure across the US. “We have a reasonable need and opportunity to do something like that in this twenty-first century,” argues Cerf. However, he also argues that it is very important that we invest in the twenty-first century versions of those infrastructures. “We don’t want to build the 1950’s versions of infrastructure. We want to build the 2010 versions. We have to go back and ask ourselves, technologically, ‘What kinds of infrastructure could we build? What kind of infrastructure would create more opportunities for businesses to invent new products and services?’ Here we are on the edge of a very chaotic environment and there are a lot opportunities that we could take advantage of.

The future of the internet?
Vint Cerf offers his thoughts.
“Frequent speculation is that somehow as the internet gets larger and larger and more computers with more software and more memory flow into it that someday it will simply wake up and become self-aware. I am somewhat sceptical of this, although I will say that as we provide the internet with more and more information – and in particular the ability to experience the world the way we do through video cameras, microphones and sensors – the internet could potentially have a kind of sensory system like human beings do. 

“The question is, ‘How does the internet experience that information?’ In a human being, the information is sensed through our neural system and then goes into a neural network in our heads. The neural networks are extremely complex, and they are quite malleable. In fact, the imposition of sensory data into the brain physically affects the way in which the brain evolves. The internet could conceivably affect a similar kind of evolution, but it might require human beings to change the software because we don’t have self-programming systems at this stage of the game. 

“I think, though – in my science-fiction speculative moments – that if the internet could interact with the environment in ways like human beings interact that we might someday actually find that the internet or its successor could become self-aware. For me that’s still science fiction. But you can certainly see on another axis here that – independent of self-awareness – the network and the sensory systems associated with it can handle much more information than any individual human being could handle and could process that information with all the huge computing power that’s available, and so that’s a different kind of intelligence than what you and I have.”

This article first appeared in Infrastructure magazine, American edition, in June 2009: www.americainfra.com/article/Issue-1/Lead-Features/Cerfs-Up/.