2012 ‘Most Tumultuous Year’ for Internet Since Its Founding, Google’s Cerf Declares
NEW ORLEANS -- The Internet community has been “under attack on an international scale” in the last year, said Google Chief Internet Evangelist and Vice President Vinton Cerf Friday in his keynote at the National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors annual meeting. Cerf thinks 2012 has been the “most tumultuous year” for the Internet since its beginnings, he said, referring to growing international concern about regulating the Internet and bringing a new form of governance to the network, set for further international discussions later this year. Such potential changes would be devastating and counter to the Internet’s original mission and driving force, he said.
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Cerf praised the Internet’s “openness of design” and capacity for “permissionless innovation.” “You just do it,” he said: “That element needs to be preserved.” Introducing limits would raise other international problems, Cerf suggested. Some countries that want to limit the freedom of expression may use tweaks in language and regulation as a way to justify their censorship, he suggested. The changes would enable these countries, he said.
Cerf praised the broader mission of NATOA. “My job, in some respects, is trying to get more Internet -- and you're doing that, so thank you,” he said, calling the association’s accomplishments “striking” and encouraging the broader sharing of their stories. Sharing the stories would help showcase the lessons learned from different fiber and telecom projects around the country, he said. These lessons will be key to making “this an enterprise others can copy,” he said. NATOA President Joanne Hovis praised Cerf’s “support for localism."
Municipal fiber and other communications projects should be allowed, Cerf argued. “It is right for municipalities to have that option,” he said. But the municipalities should consider issues of “sustainability” and “there has to be adequate subscription” to the services, he said. Google is learning these lessons in Kansas City with Google Fiber now, he said. He questioned the nature of the government services: Governments embarking on fiber projects tend to issue requests for proposals and allow the private sector to build. “It sounds like the municipality enabling the private sector,” he said of the model.
The Internet and communications technology overall will face many other changes and challenges, Cerf said. The Internet grappled with running out of new addresses last year partly due to the fact that it still ran on the prototype design he'd developed in the 1970s, he added. “The experiment never ended,” he said, saying he'd never intended those calculations to serve as the full version of the Internet people use around the world. Soon the Internet will feature domain names in other languages with characters outside the Latin alphabet, he said.
The Internet is “not as secure as we would like” and people need to beef up their knowledge of “strong authentication” and new methods of protecting passwords, Cerf said. The so-called Internet of Things will also revolutionize the years to come, he said, suggesting even refrigerators equipped with Internet connections. Google’s driverless car is “not as autonomous as I thought,” Cerf said, referring to the way the machines collect information and send it back to Google for use with other machines. “You build up an enormous amount of understanding,” he said of the accumulated knowledge.
His keynote touched on a wide range of topics, including the possibility of a spacecraft traveling to Earth’s nearest star in 100 years and the difficulty of interplanetary communication. The latter led to a new method of communication known as disruption tolerant networking, intended for space operations but also with potential use for public safety officials, Cerf said. These communications protocols are highly resistant and work well in “hostile and disrupted” environments -- as public safety may well need, he said.
Cerf remained firm about the value of the Internet’s freedom. “All of the value in the Net is because it’s so open,” he said. The competition and lack of firm regulation is crucial to its operations, he said.