Internet legend

Vint Cerf, a legend in the computer science and Internet world, has once again been honored for his achievements as one of the key pioneers in creating the Internet.

This time, though, it was the Hasso-Plattner Institute, in Postdam, just outside of Berlin, which made Cerf an honorary fellow on Wednesday. He now joins the ranks of Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel, and Cerf's colleague, Robert Kahn, with whom he developed TCP/IP, the fundamental protocol that makes the Internet function.

While the Hasso-Plattner Institute is fairly young, Cerf said he was impressed with the creativity and innovation being fostered there - it is the only institute in Germany to offer graduate-level degrees in computer network engineering.

"For me this is a special honor because it comes from a community that cares about technology, that care about the kinds of things that I care about," Cerf said in his remarks.

Voluntary collaboration

At the beginning of his career, Cerf played a key role in developing what was then called the ARPANET, which lead to today's Internet.

The ARPANET, at that time, was an American government-funded project run by ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency, which later became part of the US Department of Defense. Cerf and a team of other graduate students at the University of California, Los Angeles enabled the first connection on the network on October 29, 1969.

Over his 40-year career, Cerf subsequently worked at Stanford University with Robert Kahn in the 1970s, where they developed the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), as it is formally known, which is the basic communication standard or protocol of the Internet.

Later, Cerf worked for the former American telecom giant MCI, and in 2005 he became a Google vice president and the company's "Chief Internet Evangelist."

Yet decades ago, Cerf could not have imagined the ubiquitous impact the Internet has had on human life and culture around the world.

Today there are over two billion Internet users, including the 20 percent of the world's five billion Internet-enabled mobile phones.

While Cerf and Kahn are responsible for developing this standard, Cerf points out that the only reason it works en masse is because all mobile phones, computers, tablet devices and everything else choose to use the same protocol.

Cerf described the Internet as one huge "voluntary collaboration."

No patents

When Cerf and Kahn were working on TCP/IP and expanding the reach of the ARPANET, they decided that they would not patent the network nor its underlying architecture.

"We made that decision consciously," he told Deutsche Welle. "The reason why we decided not to put any intellectual property constraints on the Net is that we didn't want any barriers in the way of people adopting the network technology. So we said 'no patents' and we released all the documentation freely and publicly."

This spirit led to what Cerf has dubbed "permissionless innovation".

"For example, when Larry Page and Sergey Brin created Google, their objective was to index the World Wide Web," he observed. "They didn't have to get permission from every Internet service provider in the world to try their idea out. They just wrote the software and put it on the Net."

Cerf pointed out that the same can be said for the people that invented Amazon, Skype, Yahoo or Facebook or countless other startups.

In addition to permissionless innovation, the actual structure of the Internet has enabled creativity to thrive.

"If you're a designer one of the most counter-intuitive things to recognize is that sometimes you can over-design a system," he said. "The Internet was not designed to do anything in particular. The only thing it was designed to do was to take a bag of bits from point A to point B with some probability greater than zero. That's all that we tried to do."

But, this allowed the Internet to be adaptive to a variety of applications, like e-mail, and text chat, and later, more modern applications like Google Maps, YouTube and Skype.

Future Challenges

While the Internet's design has many strong features, there are also shortcomings in terms of system security and IP addresses, the individual unique address or location of anything on the Internet at any given time.

Decades ago, Cerf and his colleagues never imagined that there would be so many devices on the Internet, and as such, what is known as IPv4, or IP version 4, only has 4.2 billion possible unique addresses.

While that may seem like a lot, the world exhausted that quantity earlier this year. As a way to tackle this problem, Cerf and many others around the world have already been working on accelerating the deployment of IPv6, which would greatly expand the number of IP addresses to 3.4 undecillion, or 3.4 trillion trillion trillion.

Cerf has also set his sights on outer space - he's currently working on the Interplanetary Internet together with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and other computer scientists around the world to develop a new standard to communicate across the solar system.

By-mid 2009, nearly forty years after the "four-node ARPANET" was established in the United States, one ground station and three spacecraft are using this new Interplanetary Internet protocol.

"It's a good example of requiring new technology and new protocols in order to overcome the long distances in space and the disruption caused by celestial mechanics," Cerf said.

Despite the wealth of innovation and possibility, there are problems with security and cybercrime online. Earlier this week, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, speaking at the G8 summit called on governments to "civilize" the Internet. While Cerf agrees that abuses need to be dealt with, he cautioned against quashing creativity.

"My colleagues and I at Google hope that we can preserve the openness of the Internet - the thing which has permitted all these applications to be developed," he said. "And I think it would be a great loss if, in our zeal to deal with abusive practises on the net, that we accidentally killed all of the innovation which has made the Internet so valuable."

Author: Cinnamon Nippard, Potsdam
Editor: Cyrus Farivar