Quotes from Vint Cerf

Writing software is a very intense, very personal thing. You have to have time to work your way through it, to understand it. Then debug it.

In the earliest days, this was a project I worked on with great passion because I wanted to solve the Defense Department's problem: it did not want proprietary networking and it didn't want to be confined to a single network technology.

Some people argue we should solve all the problems on Earth before going off the planet, but that's like telling Lewis and Clark to stay put until the rest of the East was settled. No way.

The idea that you can somehow erase the Internet is silly.

Allowing a handful of broadband carriers to determine what people see and do online would fundamentally undermine the features that have made the Internet such a success, and could permanently compromise the Internet as a platform for the free exchange of information, commerce, and ideas.

I expect to see a lot of household appliances on the Net by 2010, as well as autos and other mobile devices.

Free is not going to go away. Either the advertising model will still work, or there will still be literally hundreds of millions of people who want to put their information on the Net and want people to have access to it.

The idea was that you could grow a system like the Internet one network at a time and then interconnect them. In some sense, the most important thing was the invention of the architecture protocols that enabled the Internet.

The Internet is literally a network of networks.

We had no idea that this would turn into a global and public infrastructure.

History is rife with examples of governments taking actions to 'protect' their citizens from harm by controlling access to information and inhibiting freedom of expression and other freedoms outlined in The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We must make sure, collectively, that the Internet avoids a similar fate.

While the United States has never decreed that everyone has a 'right' to a telephone, we have come close to this with the notion of 'universal service' - the idea that telephone service (and electricity, and now broadband Internet) must be available, even in the most remote regions of the country.

By 1988, I'm seeing this commercial phenomenon beginning to show up. Hardware makers are selling routers to universities so they can build up their campus networks. So I remember thinking, 'Well, how are we going to get this in the hands of the general public?' There were no public Internet services at that point.

When I helped to develop the open standards that computers use to communicate with one another across the Net, I hoped for but could not predict how it would blossom and how much human ingenuity it would unleash.

It's the Industrial Revolution and the growth of urban concentrations that led to a sense of anonymity.

There is an odd mix of permeability and impermeability in the Net. You won't be able to communicate with everyone, and not every application will be accessible to everyone.

The Internet of Things tell us that a lot of computer-enabled appliances and devices are going to become part of this system, too: appliances that you use around the house, that you use in your office, that you carry around with yourself or in the car. That's the Internet of Things that's coming.

Their Internet usage is growing very rapidly, and even they can do the math: If everyone in China needed an IPv4 address - just one - this country would use up one third of the entire public IP address space.

We will have more Internet, larger numbers of users, more mobile access, more speed, more things online and more appliances we can control over the Internet.

Today we have 1 billion users on the Net. By 2010 we will have maybe 2 billion.

Given that my title at Google is Chief Internet Evangelist, I feel like there is this great challenge before me because we have three billion users, and there are seven billion people in the world.

Like almost every major infrastructure, the Internet can be abused and its users harmed. We must, however, take great care that the cure for these ills does not do more harm than good. The benefits of the open and accessible Internet are nearly incalculable, and their loss would wreak significant social and economic damage.

Energy, health care and education are just three examples of areas in which information and information management are critically important. How are we using our energy? What appliances in homes or business are consuming the most energy? When do they consume it? Can the load be shifted? How efficient are these devices?

Although the FCC has tried to introduce net neutrality rules to avoid abusive practices like favoring your own services over others, they have struggled because there has been more than one court case in which it was asserted the FCC didn't have the authority to punish ISPs for abusing their control over the broadband channel.