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Vint Cerf on the Future of the Net
johnd writes "The internet is set to become the basis for just about every form of communication, according to net pioneer Vint Cerf, and he should know what he is talking about. Not terribly in depth, but an interesting read all the same."
From the article:
The next decade, he believes, will see the net spread even further and start to become the basic communications infrastructure for almost anything.
This unnerves me a little. We saw the dot com bubble burst after everyone decided thast the internet was the future of commerce, and we still have not fully recovered from that one. I sure as hell don't want to put all our eggs in this basket all over again and potentially see another messy commercial disaster take out the communications infrastructure... Maybe I am being a little too uptight about it, but I can't shake the feeling after last time.
Be excellent to each other. And... PARTY ON, DUDES!
The article does have evidence to back the claims up, for example it mentions VoIP...
In Japan NTT's profits have been dented because people can call much more cheaply via the Yahoo BB VoIP service they get as part of their ADSL subscription.
plus vint cerf isn't commercially linked to the internet in the same way that gates is to windows.
That's pretty much all I use for communication, that and the traditional face-to-face, sure I use the phone once in a while but that's about it.
The internet was not designed for such things as real time video, audio and broadcasting of any form. A lot of 'hacking' of the original protocols is necessary to support all these efficiently on the internet. VoIP and video on the web are 'cheap' simply because of the different way ISPs charge for bandwidth compared with telcos, and not because there is something inherently superior about using the net for everything. So there is the possibility of the internet continuing to run side by side with other communication systems.
Yes, side-by-side.
Well, sadly, Bill Gates says that all the time, and he's basically right. Okay, sure, OS X has made some inroads, but I think 90% qualifies for "just about every form". Check out Google's latest Zeitgeist -- 3% Mac, 1% Linux, 4% Other. The remaining 92%, some form of Microsoft Windows.
Don't get me wrong -- I love Linux, and I wish MS would die a fast yet incredibly painful death, but the reality is we've got a long, long way to go before we've made a dent in MS's personal computing monopoly. Maybe this year is the year we finally make a meaningful difference, but it's going to take some watershed event.
When the phone company installs a new box on the wall, along with a 70% cut in telephone bills, they will all have VoIP. The idea that people will put voice over IP over voice is just silly. They will put all voice over IP. They will dump their analogue modems and use a cheap network gateway.
The consumer doesn't matter, it's all about infrastructure.
The internet (IP-based, as we know it) is only a complement to other forms of coummications. Phone-style networks that are switched and provide a virtually copper wire from one person to another (or several) is there to stay, because it provides constant, low latency. Postal services are there to stay as well because they can transport physical good (that can be information too).
The only thing missing is a secure network. That's the fourth element that's really missing. If people had a secure network, they could vote and pay online. Current over-IP methods aren't good enough, and don't provide the sense of security needed. over-the-phone solutions aren't very secure either.
The closest thing to a secure network I can think of it France's government-run X25 network, that powers the national Minitel network, that is inaccessible to anybody but authorised France Telecom personel, and runs completely separate from the internet. In fact, it was there before the internet. People in France use it massively to order and pay for things online, and some exams, notably the amateur radio exam, is taken on the Minitel too. Many people predicted the death of the Minitel because it's slow (1200/75 bauds) and very expensive (0.34 EUR / minute) but it's still around and going strong because people trust it, with good reasons.
Once we have (1) the internet for most mundane data transfers, (2) the phone services, (3) the postal services and (4) the secure network, then people's habit will really change. As long as the secure network is missing, I don't think the internet alone will change much of anything.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
For several years running? But not in this article.
We should all ask ourselves: The internet was not designed for this, wouldn't it be better to use something that was?
The Internet was not designed, period.
The Internet grew into what it is now from a large variety of smaller networks. The protocols that make the Internet as we know it work were designed, to be sure, but most of them weren't even designed together. DNS, for example, is an essential factor in today's Internet, but it was designed independant of TCP/IP. The same can be said of SMTP, FTP, HTTP, etc. These things came about to fill needs as they arose.
And the Internet will continue to grow and evolve. Even IP, the net's fundamental building block, will change as IPv6 is implemented.
The Internet is a fantastic example of the power of bottom-up design. Implicit in your comment is the notion that we'd be better off usign a top-down design, where we sit around and think up all the things we want the net to do, and then try to design a big system that has facilities for all those different things. I think that if we did that, we'd either fail miserably, or we'd end up with something that looks very much like today's Internet.
Why should Vint Cerf know what he's talking about?
Why should you? Seriously, Vint has had a huge impact on the way the world works. His ideas and implementation of ideas changed the world once already.
-- $G