The Hindu Business Line : Googler's day out

For Vinton G. Cerf, Vice-President and Chief Internet Evangelist of Google, the Internet is all about collaboration and sharing. This universal platform can only get better by the day with user-centric services.

From the developer point of view, security remains a big challenge along with another major issue that he describes as `Information decay.'

During his India visit recently, he was in Bangalore and Hyderabad, interacting with Googlers and technologists, sharing his experience and vision for the future.

Here's a sampling of the gyan he shared.

Artificial vs human

The Internet, he says, does not recognise the content, it just carries whatever is mounted on it through packages.

Convergence and peer-to-peer communication continue to drive innovation.

An ideal situation would be one where a server recognises a personal device such as Blackberry, which one carries, to alert him that a particular service is available within the vicinity as opposed to finding out which network to hop onto.

"I would love to have such a situation as it brings seamlessness," he says. So is the case for a universal controller for all digital devices.

The 63-year-old engineer and researcher has this great ability to simplify his research work that now touches billions of people each day.

Cerf, who has been working on the Internet for nearly three-and-a-half decades since taking up a defence network project, says the world of innovation has brought about great and some weird products.

For instance, you now have Internet-connected refrigerators, surf-boats and garments. But do we really need some of them? If you extrapolate this idea, may be the refrigerator would dictate to you as to what you should eat to stay healthy.

So will artificial intelligence challenge human intelligence? Cerf, referring to works such as "The Singularity is near: When Humans Transcend Biology," and "The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Excel Human Intelligence," by 2030, says computing power may go up by leaps and bounds but it still has its own limitations. Just like the Internet cannot replace human interaction, artificial intelligence cannot replace the human face.

Net - no American invention

As someone credited with having created the Internet, shouldn't he have patented it? Cerf says this was developed along with Bob Kahn and Yogen Dayal. The "Internet would not have worked if we had patented it. The Internet is not an American invention as many people from across the world have contributed to its evolution since early days."

The Internet usage reflects a gradual transformation as the nature and distributed user base varies from region to region. Over the last 10 years, this has grown to over 1.1 billion users, with Europe accounting for 312 million, Asia 389 million, North America 232 million, Latin America 88 million and Africa about 33 million. Internet penetration is now estimated at about 16 per cent and Asia with a share of 56 per cent of global population has immense scope to grow.

Telecom action

As the world is set to add about a billion phones this year, a large number of them would be data-enabled handsets. This means, may users would get onto the Internet using mobile phones, directly.

Referring to the rapid pace at which the mobile user base is growing in India, Cerf says this is nothing but dramatic and from about 150-200 million phones, this could go up significantly. One of the challenges faced over the Internet is with regard to good quality of video.

Tracing the early days of Internet evolution, Cerf says the origin could be traced to Arpanet, a network of four computers.

"Networks need to transition to the Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPV6) within two years or else it is likely we will run out of domain identity allocation capability. Japan and China have made big headway in its adoption and others would follow," he cautions.

Security over the Internet continues to be a big area of innovation.

There is no answer as this involves issues relating to operating systems, domain name security and those who create trouble through Botnets and `denial of service' attacks. There is a need to develop tools to detect and remove infections while strengthening firewalls and creating encrypted tunnels.

Backward compatibility

"As the Internet has evolved into a large repository of information, we are now faced with a different challenge of maintaining backward compatibility."

Explaining this issue, he wants to know if all the information stored in, say, PowerPoint 1997, could be accessed in the year 3000. Maintaining backward compatibility will not be easy, he says, as this will lead to `information decay'.

Will the $100-million laptop planned by MIT researcher Nicholas Negroponte be successful? Cerf says, "well it looks like a $500-million laptop. The project is ideal but to make it affordable and available for $100, it would require a large order of 5 million."

Citing his recent interaction at the World Economic Forum, he says, "we need to assess whether a laptop per child is the right model as I believe that a community computer centre could help."

For India to be able to penetrate the rural areas with broadband network, he suggests that community local networks need to be developed by local municipalities.

Will the proliferation of online newspapers impact the media industry?

"There is a saying that either you eat the cake or someone else will eat it." It will be better if newspaper industry players get prepared for new delivery mechanisms over the Internet, he says.

Apart from motivating young developers at Google, where the average age is 26, Cerf works on the InterPlanet Project for Internet connectivity between Earth and Mars for the Jet Propulsion Lab and Nasa. He says significant strides have been made with the Mars Rover project.

So why would he work at Google? For an enterprise that is eight years old, it is nice to see that nobody as yet has learnt that something is not possible. This is a great motivation in itself, he says.

vrishi@thehindu.co.in