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Vint Cerf on the Future of the Net

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the got-net? dept.

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."

4 of 103 comments (clear)

  1. Basis for communication? Well... by GeckoFood · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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!
    1. Re:Basis for communication? Well... by Otter · · Score: 4, Interesting
      Not that any of this has much to do with his point, but:

      Everyone is the same as everyone else and we live on the same planet. Brits, Americans are no better or worse than Iraqis, Iranians, North Koreans or any other nationals.

      A 6.6 earthquake recently killed two people in Paso Robles. A week later, another 6.6 earthquake killed 25,000 people in Bam. That doesn't make Americans better or worse than Iranians (the refusal to accept even unofficial aid from the only country in the Middle East with a modern rescue and emergency medicine capability aside) but it certainly suggests that one society is better at building safe houses than the other...

      QUALity eQUALs eQUALity

      ...the elegant logic of your proof notwithstanding.

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      What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
  2. Re:Know what he's talking about? by EpsCylonB · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  3. Re:Dangers in exceeding the original design by YouHaveSnail · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.