A chat with the man who invented the internet
Vint Cerf, 'co-founder of the internet', tells Matthew d'Ancona that its power has barely begun to be realised and that the freedom it gives to people vastly outweighs any loss of privacy Imagine actually meeting Thomas Edison, or the Wright Brothers, or Newton, or Archimedes, or whichever Sumerian it was who invented the wheel in the fifth millennium sc. That, when you think about it, is what it's like to have a conversation with Vint Cerf. Few people in the history of humanity can say with confidence that they invented or discovered something that has changed the trajectory of the species, but this genial Connecticut-born 64-year-old is among their number.
Cerf is none other than the joint Father of the Internet (Robert E. Kahn being the other proud parent), which means that if you are reading this article on the Spectator website, or plan to send any emails today, or expect to use Google, or order a book on Amazon, you are doing so thanks to him And it is at the London offices of Google that we meet, the bearded Cerf cutting a dash in his three-piece suit amid the dressed-down web dudes who are all, in a sense, his technological grandchildren.
A mathematician by training and a computer scientist by vocation, he now devotes much of his time to explaining why it all matters, and what it all means; since 2005 he has been Google's Chief Internet Evangelist (he asked for the title Archduke' first, before the unfortunate precedent of Sarajevo, 1914, was pointed out to him). It is a role that suits both his countenance — fastidiously turned-out wizard, with a twinkle in his eye — and his unusual talent for explaining in layman's terms and with infectious enthusiasm the thing he helped to invent.
As a scientist, Cerf's genius was to see the potential of the so-called 'packet switching' system of sending data along shared links to enable computers to talk to one another at high speed — initially to solve the US military's communications problems. Many would set the date of the internet's invention as 22 November 1977, the day when one such 'packet' travelled 88,000 miles across three networks (the US Defense Department's ARPANET, the Packet Radio Network and the Atlantic Packet Satellite network).
'There wasn't a eureka moment,' Cerf says, 'a sudden hallucination or vision.' Instead, he identifies an earlier period of dynamic thinking at Stanford in 1973: 'How could we make something that was very, very flexible, expandable, future-proof and everything else? Within about six months we figured out what is today's architecture, the basics, and in that sense there was an ah-ha [moment]: "I see how it's solved this problem, I see how it's solved it in a very, very general way."
But the real eye-opener came much, much later, in 1988, at an internet show. 'I recall I went to a booth from [the technology company] Cisco, and I said: "How much do these things cost?" He said, "Well, maybe a quarter of a million of dollars." I remember thinking that there was a real market for this technology and it can't be just the academics. So I realised, literally at that moment — "My God, we can do something to create an economic engine. Because if we don't, the internet won't be available to the general public." I resolved that day to start lobbying the US government to allow commercial traffic to flow over governmentsponsored back-up.' The following year, the internet became fully commercial — which is why, as you read this, your teenage son is in his bedroom on Bebo or Facebook, your husband is checking a cricket statistic online and your best friend wants an iPhone for Christmas.
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).
'People were denied access to the means to communicate, because all the media was under the control of a relatively small group, compared to the general population. Then the internet comes along and absolutely blew that up. If there is anything which I think is cool about the internet, it is that it blew up the absolute control of the media, to create a real honest-to-God, two-way contributory system.' And it threatens hierarchies? 'Oh, does it ever! It whacks them, absolutely flattens them.'
And what about all the rubbish and horror on the internet? Well, says its creator: if you hold a mirror up to humanity, you will see the cloven hoof as well as the halo. 'Do you know that people print stuff on paper that is really offensive? Have you ever watched the television and watched something you felt had negative value? So each medium can clearly have worthless content, and it is the same on the internet.'
Not content with wiring up the world, Vint Cerf now wants to conquer the stars — or at least the solar system. His new project is to facilitate exploration of Mars by standardising communications in space, so that every new mission can benefit from information sent by the remnants of old ones. 'The consequence of this over time is an interplanetary background which will support new missions, and that's how the internet works. The standard is there to use any assets out there. We are ten years into this project and we have gone through four generations of design.... Of course it's exciting, going out into the universe, and I love science fiction. But as a pragmatist I want a hell of a lot more robotic explorations before we send people out there. So I am very excited about what we are doing right now.'
You get the feeling that he will succeed, too. Vint Cerf is the sort of man you could shoot the breeze with all day. But our audience is brought to a close by a phone call. And wouldn't you know it? It's Nasa holding on line one.
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