?The Internet is threatened?: Google?s chief internet evangelist Vint Cerf

LAS VEGAS ? Sitting in his hotel suite in Las Vegas, Vint Cerf is just a short cab ride away from the showroom floor of the International Consumer Electronics Show, where thousands of devices are connecting to the Internet using technologies he helped pioneer nearly 40 years ago.

Known as one of the fathers of the Internet for pioneering technologies that enable computer networks to communicate, Mr. Cerf now serves as the chief internet evangelist for Google Inc., where he acts as something of an ambassador for the search engine giant and the Web at large.

FP Tech Desk editor Matt Hartley had a chance to speak to Mr. Cerf about how older generations are learning to use technology, the rising threat of increased Internet regulation and 30 years of TCP/IP. Below is an edited transcript of that interview.

FP: 2013 marks the 30th anniversary of the birth of the modern-day Internet. We?re here at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas, there are thousands of booths of people connecting to the Web. As you sit here 30 years on, what?s it like to step into something like this with something that you helped create to see all these people working with it?

VC: Ironically, there?s a 40th anniversary hiding in here because Bob [Robert Kahn] and I did the original design work between March and September of 1973, so for us this year is the 40th anniversary. We turned it on on Jan. 1, 1983, but 10 years earlier we began the actual work and it took us five years to iterate through implementation designs, fix repair design and another five years to get enough of this stuff implemented on enough operating systems to tell everybody on the experimental ARPAnet that they had to switch over to the new Internet protocols so that we could build multi-network systems.

So for me, I can?t speak for Bob, walking into shows like CES, seeing the enormous mutually reinforcing power of mobile and appliance technology connected to the Internet is pretty amazing. These devices are already pretty smart by any reasonable estimate, but the fact that they can reach the Internet and exercise control over huge resources that are on the network, interact with them, ignite them, makes them mutually reinforcing.

We have a cohort of people who want to stay connected to each other, especially as they get older

FP: You?re going to be speaking at the Silvers Summit here at CES. What do you plan to speak about during your keynote?

VC: Several things. First of all I?m going to point out that not only does our silver community know how to use this stuff, some of us invented it. So let?s not sell the older population short.

It is a very large and increasing population here in [North America] and therefore should not be ignored, and second, these folks are very creative users of new technology. Not all of them, plainly. But what you discover is that we have a cohort of people who want to stay connected to each other, especially as they get older.

So the technology of the Internet and some of the social networking mechanisms are wonderful ways of achieving that objective ? One thing which I still feel a need to pursue is that many people in this age group who are living in retirement homes do need help getting access to or getting trained on new versions of this technology. Some of it?s pretty complicated and, in a sense, one of the objectives that I have as an employee of Google is to try and make these kinds of applications increasingly easy for everyone to use.

FP: Do you feel as though technology companies are looking at people with disabilities or as you say, people in their silver years, as a target market? Are they putting enough resources behind addressing their needs?

VC: The answer is yes and no. The actual technologies are stunningly effective. The cochlear implant is a good example of that. Ocular implants, spinal implants, are still in a more nascent state, but that technology is moving ahead, it?s probably 20 years behind where the cochlear implants are. On the other hand, it?s not always recognized that that cohort is one that is attractive to market to, as opposed to children who are born deaf or younger people who have disabilities. So I actually want to encourage, this means talking to you and others, that the community that deals with assistive technology should be more aggressive about explaining the utility and value of those technologies to people who could take advantage of them.

FP: Why do you suppose we?re seeing an increased interest from some governments to exert a greater control over the Web?

VC: The Internet is threatened by governments that want to control content and use of the network. All of us have gotten accustomed to freedom of expression and freedom of access to content on the net, but we have also gotten accustomed to something called permissionless innovation, which is a phrase I use to explain why it?s so important to keep the network relatively open and freely accessible. It?s so that anyone who wants to try a new application out can just do so.

The problem is that sometimes the proposed cure is worse than the disease

We all have to appreciate that there are harms that occur on the net, no one who tells you otherwise should be believed, there?s viruses, worms, trojan horses and other kinds of technical attacks on the net turning your machine into a member of a botnet that generates spam or generates denial of service attacks or directly goes after content on your machine, there?s key loggers that go looking for passwords and account numbers. Those are bad.

The problem is that sometimes the proposed cure is worse than the disease, and in some cases it is to shut down the Internet or block websites or to interfere with our ability to make use of the system, and these harms and their remedies are used as an excuse to prevent political speech, to prevent people from sharing information from knowing what is going on, it?s to obscure transparent visibility of what the government is doing. Governments that are authoritarian are feeling threatened by the freedom and openness of expression and discovery of information on the Internet so they will use any excuse they can find to shut that network down. That?s what you?re seeing right now.

Source: http://business.financialpost.com/2013/01/11/the-internet-is-threatened-googles-chief-internet-evangelist-vint-cerf/

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