April 25, 2006
Cerf: We Need to Preserve Permission-Free Internet
(Reston, VA) Vint Cerf, “father” of the Internet and currently Internet Evangelist at Google, kicked off the jam-packed Digital Cities Expo here today with a wide-ranging and, as usual, highly informative keynote speech. Cerf offered first a bird’s eye view of the development of the Internet, noting that there are currently more than a billion users on the Internet and more than 400 million machines running in server mode.
Despite this phenomenal presence, “when there are 6.5 billion people in the world, you realize we have a long way to go,” he said.
Cerf argued against the concept of a two-tiered Internet advocated by some broadband providers, telcos in particular. He recapped the idea that the Internet is built on an end-to-end principle, with one user paying for his access on one end and the other user paying for her access on the other end. Once each endpoint access is paid for, the two users are free to communicate back and forth.
“The reason that’s important is that the network allows people to do pretty much what they want to do. You don’t have to ask permission from the ISP,” Cerf said. “The permission-free way to the Internet has fostered all kinds of innovation.”
Broadband providers, therefore, shouldn’t have the right to alter users’ access to Internet content and applications based on the deals they cut. “They [users] should not be constrained by broadband carriers based on deals they made with someone else,” Cerf said.
He also advocated that broadband should be symmetrical. The notion that individual users might someday own their own servers for transmitting massive amounts of information across the Internet is not a far-fetched one, Cerf said.
Without symmetrical upstream communications, innovation is slowed. “I consider asymmetric broadband platform a stopping point or a plateau beyond which we must go,” he said.
Speaking to an audience composed mostly of local government employees, Cerf stressed that geo-indexing of content can promote a city’s economic development. “When you put a city up online and incorporate into the information that is available things that are geographically indexed, you can develop all kinds of interesting services.”
Understanding where traffic congestion is occuring in real-time, for example, or just compiling information on all the numerous aspects of community life will lead to a “city that knows itself,” Cerf said, which can only improve operations and the city’s attractiveness. “I can’t overemphasize the utility of this geographically indexed information.”
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at April 25, 2006 10:35 AM