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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."
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.
Why should Vint Cerf know what he's talking about? Sure, he knows all about the Internet; but does he know all about communication in general?
Would the sotry submitter agree with the (equivalently valid) statement that "Microsoft Windows is set to become the basis for just about every form of personal computing, according to Bill Gates, and he should know what he is talking about"?
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
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!
As long as most (older) people I know have a 56k or 64k internet connection, and have to pay per minute online time, VoIP and the like will not become mainstream soon.
It is not that those people do not want a broadband connection, it is just not available at an affordable price in a lot of places.
And in order to make something successfull it should be available to (almost) everyone.
Troll: Large Giant, 63 hp, AC 16, Usually chaotic evil.
This should fall into a category of information that is labeled "duh". It doesn't take an engineer or a market analyst or even a high-school diploma to predict the rise of the internet as the medium for communications. IT'S ALREADY HERE! Point to a method of communication and I just bet that the internet has some relation to it now, or is expanding to include it. This is like me writing an article about how the sky will soon be blue, and all of you slashdot readers go outside and say: "That Jude character was right! The sky is BLUE!"
Get a grip folks. This guy is no futurist. And he didn't predict this any more than Al Gore invented the internet. I.E.: They were involved but it would have happened without them.
The Arpanet came before the net and demanded that all computers that connect to it do so with the same hardware and software.
I was really disappointed to read this in the article. First, it wasn't true. There were a lot of such restrictions in the early implementations, but by the time that TCP was spec'd, there were already cases of interconnected hardware and software from different vendors. TCP was a (pretty good) attempt to codify what had been learned about how to do this.
But more important is the point that such single-source restrictions were exactly why ARPA started funding what became the Internet. It was, to a great extent, a response to ongoing problems with electronic gadgets that couldn't talk to each other. The military (and ARPA was a military research agency) wanted this problem solved. What good were all those fancy-schmancy electronic thingies if they couldn't exchange data?
If you look up the early docs from the ARPAnet, you'll see pretty pictures all over the place showing large numbers of electronic gadgets, obviously from a lot of different manufacturers, with lines between them showing the comm links. It's obvious that interconnecting hardware and software from different vendors was a major goal right from the start.
There have been a number of comments on why ARPA gave their development money to universities rather than to commercial vendors. A number of military types were open about this from the start: They had learned that military contractors simply couldn't be forced to work together. Most attempts to get them to cooperate with data comm were pretty much dismal failures. They were competitors, after all. They would pretend to be cooperating, while doing everything they could to fix things so their competitors couldn't cooperate. This is still a problem, of course, and probably always will be. Commercial vendors sabotaging standards is a very familiar process.
So ARPA took the approach of funding an independent gang of academic hackers. Give them equipment and money to pay students to hack away. Fund a few overseers to attempt to coordinate this herd of cats. When they seem to have something working, buy them some fun new hardware and challenge them to incorporate it with the old stuff. Try not to let them get lazy and develop a monoculture of equipment from a single vendor. Watch what they do, and carry off anything they produce that seems useful.
But the intent from the start was to make all electronic gadgets talk sensibly to each other. If the early setups didn't achieve this, it was simply a case of "We're not there yet". The intent was to get there.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I noticed that Vint Cerf was wearing a t-shirt that said "IP on everything".
Yes, we say just the same thing at Canopy and SCO.
The real Ralph Yarro posts as Anonymous Coward. Anyone else is an impostor.
Why is this such a big leap in thinking? How many Vonage articles has Slashdot posted? What communications do you think won't be replaced by the Internet? Radio? TV? Phone? It's all just data. Radio is already on the Internet and Video-on-demand is somewhat available through *ahem* certain less than legal means. And we are starting to see phone. When wireless internet catches on how long till we see VoIP cell phones?
What do you see as not being replaced eventually?
Brian Ellenberger
"Mr Cerf has proposed extending the net to other planets"
.........
l33td00d: ph34r my l33t skillz!
marvin01: I have an Iludium pew-36 Explosive Space Modulator that can blow up the entire planet.
l33td00d: haha n00b! I pwn j00!
marvin01: Soon I will finally be able to see Venus clearly.
l33td00d: ha! I w1ll fuxX0r j00 up, l4m3r!
marvin01: Look outside, Earthling!
l33td00d: wtf!?
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
Although I do think that this is the way things are moving it won't be that simple.
In the uk, where we don't have free local calls the home phone is on the point of dying out. Allot of people in their 20s already do without a home phone and simply rely on their mobiles. As the price of mobile calls drops and BT maintain their rediculous pricing it is not outragous to imagine the only place where phone lines are used are for small bussinesses.
Larger organisations are already switching to IP phones and its likely that this could become the normal for small bussinesses aswell.
I think any hardlines will be, within a few years, mostly broadband in one guise or another, with voice and data services both being run through the net. Thsi could lead to some interesting additions to the telephone service - more advanced caller ID, the ability to send bits of text and photos as part of the phone call(rather than telling someone to check their email), who knows what else.
Mobile phones will be far more difficult to predict. They are still very much an area of growth rather than decline. Even the future of 3G phones is uncertain but I can imagine some integration with the expansion of wifi. An interesting case to look at is that of Rabbit - a pre-mobile phone idea which ran phones through local hotspots. A bit like a cordless phone with base stations around the country. We could well see Nokia producing dual phones that run through wifi if its available.
One thing that is likely to happen is a diversification between the infrastructure and the services. You will have your mobile and hardlines provided by one company but then run your (god forbid) metred wifi access, phone calls, mobile calls and god knows what else through virtual companies. This can already seen through these companies offering cheap international calls such as OneTel.
Really?
You never watch television?
Or flip on the radio?
Or pick up a newspaper?
Or read a book or magazine?
Or notice a billboard?
Or go out to a movie?
Or use a FRS radio on the ski slopes?
Or print out a report/design/specification?
Or read someone's body language?
We communicate in lots of different ways. Whether you realize it or not, I expect you don't do all your communication over the internet and telephone.
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.