'Father of the Internet' lectures about the future of the medium

A Google vice president who helped create the Internet spoke to a star-struck crowd of nearly 200 faculty members and students Friday.

Vint Cerf, a Google vice president and chief Internet evangelist, touched on contemporary Internet issues and emerging technologies in his speech. But the presence alone of a man occasionally called the Father of the Internet was enough to excite many in the crowd in the Kim Engineering Building.

"He always has new things to say," Don Riley, a business school decisions, operations and information technologies professor said. "He has such a deep involvement in and understanding of the Internet; his perspective is so unique and valued."

Students said they recognized the significance of modern Internet issues.

"Anything he presents about the Internet is important," senior electrical engineering major Ayanah George said. "The Internet impacts so many people, and I wanted to hear about emerging issues from the perspective of someone like him."

Cerf spoke about the development and evolution of the Internet, much of which he participated in or witnessed first-hand.

The Internet's historic, yet little-recognized, ongoing transition to a different Internet Protocol system prompted him to call 2009 "the most dramatic year in Internet history". Internet applications and computers will switch to a new communication language that vastly increases available Internet space and network security.

Beyond this year, Cerf said sensors that can detect changes in an environment and then send information to users via the Internet and mobile devices are going to become more a "part of the Internet environment."

Cerf discussed the possibility of how the Internet could be used in space. Much to the crowd's dismay, the interplanetary Internet access doesn't intend to communicate with extraterrestrial life, but would instead overcome the obstacles space presents, like how distance and planetary rotation obstruct communication, he said. The technology is close to being finished and could be used by NASA in the not-too-distant future.

He also identified challenges that have arisen as the Internet becomes a medium capable of saving thousands of years' worth of data.

"We may always have the files, but what happens if we lose the software needed to run those files?" Cerf said. "I'm interested in preserving software, the importance of information in a file may not be known for a hundred years."

The preservation of information is a hot topic that fuels controversies between profit-seeking businesses and the idealistic vision of the Internet as an information storage and sharing institution, he said.

"Businesses don't want to just give away the source code of their old software because it's often similar to products they are still selling," Cerf said. "We need to figure out how we can create incentives to preserve software."

Cerf ended by using social networking websites as an example for what the Internet has become and how it should be used.

"The Internet puts the obligation on each of us to distinguish the good from the bad," Cerf said. "People have always needed critical thinking, but it's needed now more than ever with the incredible quantity of information out there."

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