Father of internet spawns 600 million followers

By PAULA OLIVER

Internet pioneer Vinton Cerf is used to struggling to get away from conversations.

Almost everybody he encounters has a question for him - and the self-confessed geek turned celebrity loves to answer them.

Dr Cerf carries the affectionate label of being a father of the internet.

Twenty years ago he and Robert Kahn developed the architecture for the internet, known as the TCP/IP protocols.

Their innovation sparked the dramatic growth of the internet from 50,000 users in 1983 to more than 600 million today.

Dr Cerf is making his first visit to New Zealand this week to address the Knowledge Wave conference, and after presenting a seminar at the US Embassy in Wellington yesterday he was quickly set on by eager fans.

He admits that he finds some of the attention, though not the questioning, a bit strange.

"The part that's most weird is that teenagers come up and want to have their T-shirts autographed."

Referring to his early days with the internet, he said: "We were just geeks."

Dr Cerf spent time with the US Department of Defence in the late 1970s and early 1980s and is now looking to the future and the development of an interplanetary internet.

Asked if he ever expected the internet to become so popular, Dr Cerf said the staggering number of users was a surprise.

He identified one of the key issues facing the net today as privacy and said surveillance of emails and the internet was almost inevitable.

"It happened with the telephone system and it will certainly happen with email. There are tools to combat that - one is encryption - but the problem is that right now it's not easy enough to use.

"Perhaps the pressure and desire for privacy will be sufficient to cause us to develop better tools to secure the communication."

Dr Cerf said the level of objectionable material available on the internet was a worry but it was difficult to stop.

"There's no way to stop it technically - but the internet is a mirror of mankind. If we don't like what we see in the mirror then touching up the mirror is not the answer."

He predicted electoral voting on the net would eventually become popular, but said tensions existed between being able to authenticate a vote and still maintain voter anonymity.

"I need to authorise you as a voter but I also need to know you only voted once. Somewhere I need to keep your vote secret. I'm optimistic about being able to do it in the future."

Herald Special Report - February 18, 2003:
Knowledge Wave 2003 - the leadership forum

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