American Internet pioneer receives German tech award
Vint Cerf received an award from the Hasso-Plattner Institute in Potsdam
earlier this week. Cerf, along with another American colleague, is
well-known for having developed the Internet's underlying protocol.
Vint Cerf, a legend in the computer science and Internet world,
has once again been honored for his achievements as one of the key
pioneers in creating the Internet.
This time, though, it was the Hasso-Plattner Institute, in Postdam,
just outside of Berlin, which made Cerf an honorary fellow on Wednesday.
He now joins the ranks of Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel, and
Cerf's colleague, Robert Kahn, with whom he developed TCP/IP, the
fundamental protocol that makes the Internet function.
While the Hasso-Plattner Institute is fairly young, Cerf said he was
impressed with the creativity and innovation being fostered there - it
is the only institute in Germany to offer graduate-level degrees in
computer network engineering.
"For me this is a special honor because it comes from a community
that cares about technology, that care about the kinds of things that I
care about," Cerf said in his remarks.
Voluntary collaboration
 Cerf was made a fellow of the Hasso-Plattner Institute in PotsdamAt
the beginning of his career, Cerf played a key role in developing what
was then called the ARPANET, which lead to today's Internet.
The ARPANET, at that time, was an American government-funded project
run by ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency, which later became
part of the US Department of Defense. Cerf and a team of other graduate
students at the University of California, Los Angeles enabled the first
connection on the network on October 29, 1969.
Over his 40-year career, Cerf subsequently worked at Stanford
University with Robert Kahn in the 1970s, where they developed the
Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), as it is
formally known, which is the basic communication standard or protocol of
the Internet.
Later, Cerf worked for the former American telecom giant MCI, and in
2005 he became a Google vice president and the company's "Chief Internet
Evangelist."
Yet decades ago, Cerf could not have imagined the ubiquitous impact
the Internet has had on human life and culture around the world.
Today there are over two billion Internet users, including the 20
percent of the world's five billion Internet-enabled mobile phones.
While Cerf and Kahn are responsible for developing this standard,
Cerf points out that the only reason it works en masse is because all
mobile phones, computers, tablet devices and everything else choose to
use the same protocol.
Cerf described the Internet as one huge "voluntary collaboration."
No patents
 The invention of TCP/IP is what makes the Internet possibleWhen
Cerf and Kahn were working on TCP/IP and expanding the reach of the
ARPANET, they decided that they would not patent the network nor its
underlying architecture.
"We made that decision consciously," he told Deutsche Welle. "The
reason why we decided not to put any intellectual property constraints
on the Net is that we didn't want any barriers in the way of people
adopting the network technology. So we said 'no patents' and we released
all the documentation freely and publicly."
This spirit led to what Cerf has dubbed "permissionless innovation".
"For example, when Larry Page and Sergey Brin created Google, their
objective was to index the World Wide Web," he observed. "They didn't
have to get permission from every Internet service provider in the world
to try their idea out. They just wrote the software and put it on the
Net."
Cerf pointed out that the same can be said for the people that
invented Amazon, Skype, Yahoo or Facebook or countless other startups.
In addition to permissionless innovation, the actual structure of the Internet has enabled creativity to thrive.
"If you're a designer one of the most counter-intuitive things to
recognize is that sometimes you can over-design a system," he said. "The
Internet was not designed to do anything in particular. The only thing
it was designed to do was to take a bag of bits from point A to point B
with some probability greater than zero. That's all that we tried to
do."
But, this allowed the Internet to be adaptive to a variety of
applications, like e-mail, and text chat, and later, more modern
applications like Google Maps, YouTube and Skype.
Future Challenges
 These days, Vint Cerf is working on the Interplanetary Internet, to connect spacecraft and ground stationsWhile
the Internet's design has many strong features, there are also
shortcomings in terms of system security and IP addresses, the
individual unique address or location of anything on the Internet at any
given time.
Decades ago, Cerf and his colleagues never imagined that there would
be so many devices on the Internet, and as such, what is known as IPv4,
or IP version 4, only has 4.2 billion possible unique addresses.
While that may seem like a lot, the world exhausted that quantity
earlier this year. As a way to tackle this problem, Cerf and many others
around the world have already been working on accelerating the
deployment of IPv6, which would greatly expand the number of IP
addresses to 3.4 undecillion, or 3.4 trillion trillion trillion.
Cerf has also set his sights on outer space - he's currently working
on the Interplanetary Internet together with NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory and other computer scientists around the world to develop a
new standard to communicate across the solar system.
By-mid 2009, nearly forty years after the "four-node ARPANET" was
established in the United States, one ground station and three
spacecraft are using this new Interplanetary Internet protocol.
"It's a good example of requiring new technology and new protocols in
order to overcome the long distances in space and the disruption caused
by celestial mechanics," Cerf said.
Despite the wealth of innovation and possibility, there are problems
with security and cybercrime online. Earlier this week, French President
Nicolas Sarkozy, speaking at the G8 summit called on governments to
"civilize" the Internet. While Cerf agrees that abuses need to be dealt
with, he cautioned against quashing creativity.
"My colleagues and I at Google hope that we can preserve the openness
of the Internet - the thing which has permitted all these applications
to be developed," he said. "And I think it would be a great loss if, in
our zeal to deal with abusive practises on the net, that we accidentally
killed all of the innovation which has made the Internet so valuable."
Author: Cinnamon Nippard, Potsdam
Editor: Cyrus Farivar
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,15111037,00.html
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