Internet Opinions

Cerf has an unusual perspective, having been around the Internet for so long and having done so much. Several years ago he suggested public flogging for spammers. "It was a joke, did you think anyone was going to take it seriously?" Still, he is as frustrated as the rest of us when it comes to dealing with spam, although he says for him that filters seem to be working.

Despite this minor annoyance, he is still fascinated by networking technology. He has seen the Internet be transformed from the early days when it was just about protocols and research through the past decade where it was all about applications and ecommerce. And he still talks about the next series of challenges and opportunities for the Internet. "I mean, right now there are about a billion users, so we have five billion more to go." Doing the math Cerf means the rest of the world that isn't yet connected nor has a computer to do so. But his frustrations with spammers pale with advancing the Internet address space.

His one regret looking back on all these years of Internet innovations was "I probably would have picked a larger address space. Who would have thought that 4.3 billion addresses were too small back then in 1977?" As a result, he has been flogging the IPv6 horse for quite some time and says, "We need to switch to IPv6 so we have enough address space. I don't want to continue to play Network Address Translation games. We are still pushing hard and I think MCI will have implemented v6 by the end of the year in all of its operations. In the meantime, we are getting the pants beat off us by China and Japan who are adopting v6 a lot quicker than in the US." He thinks by the end of 2008 we can get past 50% IPv6 implementations in the US, but that may be optimistic given the state of progress.

Also on his hit list is to internationalize the domain name system to allow different character sets besides Roman letters. "This is proving harder than we hoped and quite a chore to get these different character sets like Chinese and Japanese implemented."

Finally, he is all about standards and protocols, just as he began his Internet career. "We need to move several layers upward to establishing standards. Right now we have pretty good standards at the HTTP layer but not too much above that: XML is helping, Web services will prove helpful. But we need more authentication and more distributed services. I want infrastructure and digital objects and processes to have persistence, and to be able to migrate running programs and replicate or be preserved from one machine to another."

Indeed, authentication could be the key to more advanced applications. "We haven't found more than 1% of all the apps that we can do in a distributed networking environment. The better we are able to do authentication, the more interesting our computational lives will be. I am anticipating a lot of collaborative computation, such as for online entertainment. Lot of these games are played in a distributed way, and kids are able to hear each other and see each other's avatars. Soon we will get to the point where the games will look quite realistic, like Forrest Gump, putting someone into the middle of a historical picture. We will see that kind of digital flexibility and eventually will make for news reports that can be faked. You could basically fake anybody. We will have to cope with authenticity in the future."

Cerf certainly is one of the original thinkers for our times. It was a pleasure talking to him, and he still has plenty of interesting and original ideas to go around. We wish him well at Google.