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Thursday 4 December 2008

The future of the internet

A chat with the man who invented the internet

Vint Cerf, co-inventor of the Web, looks to the stars

What was initially a nifty means of spreading information — ‘publish-and-browse’ — has now become something much more dramatic in scope. In the so-called ‘Web 2.0’ world, the internet is no longer simply an astonishing information resource: it is increasingly a means of exchange in which the users (the new breed of ‘pro-sumers’) are also the content providers, blogging, joining social networks, firing off ‘peer-to-peer’ recommendations, uploading files to YouTube, posting pictures on flickr. ‘Isn’t it cool?’ says Cerf.

Yes, but how did it happen? One minute a bunch of Stanford eggheads are talking about ‘packet switching’, the next more than a billion people are using their invention daily, and the word ‘Google’ is a verb recognised in the Oxford English Dictionary. ‘I think I know both how and why,’ says the web’s own Big Daddy. ‘There is a certain style to the internet, that absolutely trades on its openness. When people say, “Who owns the internet?”, nobody owns the internet. You own a piece of the internet, you don’t own all of it. We are extremely open to participation and anybody who can figure out some software is free to put an application on the internet and make it accessible to everybody else.’ The key, Cerf says, was that the system belonged to nobody — he and Kahn ‘decided deliberately’ not to go down the proprietary route — and that it was capable of transmitting absolutely anything.

Much of the recent debate about the internet has been snarled up by a fixation with privacy, and the web’s supposed potential as an authoritarian tool. Cerf argues that this obscures its much greater liberating, democratising power. The desire for privacy — a legitimate concern, up to a point — is more than matched by the public’s desire for the voice and platform the net gives them (in contrast to television).

More articles from: Matthew d'Ancona | this section

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