Cerf Joins Google, Part 2

In last week's column , we began our interview with Vint Cerf and spoke to him about working at Google and his expectations and challenges. In this week, we continue our discussions about his personal life and where he sees the Internet going. Rather than do this as a straight Q&A, I have put his comments into a more narrative style, because there are some things that I want to comment on my own, and also because Cerf is great at telling such wonderful stories.

Cerf has played a key role in the development of the Internet, and its underlying protocols, almost from the beginning. He is among the most well known as one of the players that began the original collection of nodes among the various academic research organizations that was the precursor to today's network in the 1970s. And while not to diminish this achievement, his more important role was in 1989 when he convinced the federal government council to open up the network to allow exchanging emails with his mail system called MCIMail.

Of course, email has changed quite a bit since those early days. "It used to be that a message with 3000 characters was considered to be a big email message. Now with video and PowerPoint attachments, 100 MB is not unusual." Another difference between email then and now is that now we have emails with complex formatting, HTML code and "already carrying programs around. That will make for some interesting times, and we are already seeing mobile pieces of software being transported around by email." At least, we hope we can can restrict mobile pieces of software to those that we want to have transported, unlike the current situation with viruses and other junk that goes around.

Does he ever regret connecting MCI Mail to the Internet back then? "Absolutely not, it was what broke the log jam." Prior to then, no commercial uses or users were allowed on the network. "We had to get special permission from the federal government to connect our system. And looking back on it now, this helped to accelerate the commercialization process of the Internet. We were very deliberate and did it to get commercial opportunities into place. Back then, we didn't think the government could afford to pay for the Internet for everyone. The only other alternative was to get a self-sustaining economic engine going, which is basically what happened."

Certainly, the Internet is a different place today as a result. "Today's problems are different, but also more complicated. In the early days, we were fumbling around just to get the damn thing to work. I have to envy all these eight-year olds that come over and tell me about their new Web sites and I think, "crap, I had to wait until I was 28 to use the Net and then we had to invent it first!" The challenges and the opportunities that it creates is just orders of magnitude than from the early days and I consider it to be quite fun."

As an example of this progress, he mentions IP telephony and Skype in particular. "Yes, Skype and SIP are part of my vocabulary. But I have mixed feelings about Skype. If you watch the calls on a network analyzer, it looks like an attack on the target network. I would much rather have SIP standards that tell us what the ports are rather than blasting around looking like you are attacking someone's host. I will certainly tip my hat to the Skype folks because they managed to figure out how to get it all to work with very little user intervention."