Timehost: Welcome to the TIME auditorium. We're thrilled to have as our guest Vinton Cerf, one of the inventors of the Internet. Mr. Cerf has just written an article for TIME magazine, in which he says that the Internet will be everywhere. Even, literally, in our bodies! So send in your questions about the past, present and future of the Internet. Who better to answer those questions than the man who invented the Internet? (Sorry, Al Gore)

Timehost: Mr. Cerf is now with us. Welcome!

Vinton Cerf: Good evening, or whatever time zone you are in, hi!! While we're waiting for questions, I'd like to clear up one little item - about the Vice President He really does deserve some credit for his early recognition of the importance of the Internet and the technology that makes it work. He was certainly among the first if not the first in Congress to realize how powerful the information revolution would be and both as Senator and Vice President he has been enormously helpful in supporting legislation and programs to help further develop the Internet - for example the Next Generation Internet program. I get to see a lot of this stuff because I am a member of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee and we regularly review the R&D programs of the US Government and many have relevance to the evolving Internet.

Timehost: Thanks....let's take the first question from online... We had a question from someone online who wanted to know whether the current problems of many e-commerce sites really mean that the Internet is better for dealing with information than for commerce.

Vint Cerf: I believe that many of the problems that have surfaced in the use of the Internet for e-commerce will be solved with time and experience. There is no doubt in my mind that the Internet has an integral role to play in e-commerce and a multitude of other applications including things like Internet-voice.

fillyred asks: When did you first realize that the Internet was going to be what it is today?

Vint Cerf: When Bob Kahn and I first started working on this in 1973, we were focused on the basic technology of the net and didn't really think about what would happen if everyone could afford to have a computer - they couldn't back in 1973, as they were million dollar items then. However about 1988 I walked into a trade show called INTEROP that was all about Internet and there were enormous displays and booths that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars - that's when I realized that we needed to change the policy for use of the Internet so that it would be allowed to become a commercial enterprise in addition to continuing its role in the academic and research establishment. I asked for permission from the US Government to interconnect MCI Mail, a commercial email service, to Internet and was allowed to do this in 1989. That year two commercial Internet Service Providers, UUNET (now a WorldCom subsidiary) and PSINet were started. So I consider that 1989 was the beginning of my realizing that Internet was going to be a really big deal.

charlie_sowell asks: A colleague who authors books on Java told us yesterday that we've just scratched the surface of what we can use the internet for. Can you give us an analogy with, say, the telephone or television as an example?

Vint Cerf: The best analogy that I can give you is to think about Internet and computers as you would the power generation and distribution system and electric motors. There seems to be no end to the things you can do by connecting to the power grid and putting motors large and small to work. Computers are like motors except they do intellectual work for us while motors amplify our muscles. The Information Revolution is all about augmenting our ability to perform intellectual work and that's why I would agree with your colleague who feels we've only scratched the surface - that's right. Moreover, there doesn't seem to be any natural end to what we can do with computers - anything we can figure out how to program is fair game, so to speak, so I don't see any limits in sight for what the Internet can be made to do.

timothymclain asks: Vint, do you think wireless Internet is the next big thing?

Vint Cerf: Wireless is certainly going to be a big deal too. The growth in the number of Internet-enabled cell phones is expected to reach about 1.5 billion by the year 2006 or sooner. That is in addition to all kinds of other devices that are going to be Internet-enabled. I use a wireless LAN at home and in the Office and this is very convenient - you can move around without thinking about wires. I am convinced that technologies such as BLUETOOTH (which is a short-range radio, not a dental condition), will make for us a household of appliances all chattering with each other and with servers out on the Internet.

mydex asks: One may say that the Internet has contributed unintentionally the digital divide that seems to be widening. Does Mr. Cerf believe that eventually the Internet can address and provide equal access to power of information to everyone?

Vint Cerf: I am persuaded that the digital divide is going to be conquered in the same way that the television and the telephone and the radio have become very widespread (not to say ubiquitous though) over the last 50-100 years. All the indications are that the costs for the equipment to get on the net will drop and the competition for Internet service will drive prices down towards cost as well. I think competition and economics will go a long way towards solving the digital divide. That doesn't mean we should just relax - we should continue to work towards the goal of making the Internet accessible to everyone. As the Internet Society motto says: Internet is for Everyone. We have much work ahead of us to make that really true.

drdre14_1985 asks: Will we be logged onto the Internet for 24 hours in the future?

Vint Cerf: As a matter of fact, yes!! What will happen is that we will have devices that are online at all times sort of watching over things for us - just as our pagers and cell phones are theoretically reachable at any time (as long as they haven't been turned off). I am sure that we will have a lot of appliances in our homes, offices, cars and even on our bodies that are online 24 hours per day. In fact, some of these programmable devices will work for us while we are doing something else (like sleeping). So in that sense, we will be online all the time.

altron_guyl5 asks: Do you think Microsoft being forced to break up will affect the Internet?

Vint Cerf: It is too early to tell just what effect the Microsoft situation will have - I recently heard on the radio that the case will go to an appeals court - it isn't clear what will come of the appellate review nor what would happen should that review be remanded to the Supreme Court. If the breakup of AT&T is any example, though, the parts proved to be very strong competitors in the marketplace and it's conceivable that the "baby Bills" would be as vigorous in the market as the "baby Bells" were in the past.

timothymclain asks: Vint, what are your feelings/thoughts about the future of the Internet in K-12 schools?

Vint Cerf:I am a strong proponent of the use of Internet in schools but also at home. In fact, I think school use without home access could prove frustrating for students, so I hope that the two can go hand in hand. Of course, kids in school may come to hate the idea that the teacher and their parents can exchange email and visit chat rooms to talk about how "Johnny" is doing in school. When Johnny comes home and says "I don't have any homework, Mom" and mom says "Oh yes you do, I looked on your class website" - that's when the two-edged sword of the Internet will suddenly become apparent!!! I really do think that Internet is going to be and already has been very beneficial in educational environments - it is one of the most facile media in existence and millions of people can contribute their knowledge to the network so we can all benefit. At WorldCom, we've been doing our part in a program we call Marco Polo - we've teamed up with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Geographic Society and many other quality institutions to produce content that meets educational standards and that teachers can use in the course of teaching. We hope that this will become a trend and that Internet-based teaching will become as common in the future as the chalkboard was 50 years ago.

Timehost: Since we're in a chat, it's only appropriate to ask these two questions about chat...

richboy0 asks: 10 years ago would you have imagined yourself being able to participate in a web based chat format like this one with anyone on the Internet who chose to join?

warlock_1983_2000 asks: What is the future of chatting going to be like?

Vint Cerf: Actually, I was doing the equivalent of chat waaaay back in 1970 if you can believe that on the predecessor to the Internet, the ARPANET. Linking two terminals together or a bunch of them together so that everyone could see what anyone typed was a very common way of "meeting" and discussing issues back then on timeshared machines. That's what we're doing now but it is more elaborate and better arranged than the line at a time systems we used in the past. I think chatting will go forward in three ways. First, we will still find it very helpful to be able to type to each other. As a person with a hearing impairment, I can tell you that being able to READ what someone wants to say is a big help in maintaining accuracy in communication. However, the Internet's technology will also allow us to really speak to each other as in a conference call so that is one additional direction; and I think we will be able to do video conferencing as well on the net. Finally, with speech recognition systems, such as the one that Nuance Corporation has produced, it may be possible to take a spoken conversation and render it as text. So CHAT is going to be around for a good long time and its going to be even richer in its character then it is today.

lexi_40205 asks: Will virtual reality replace reality for a substantial part of the human race? Sort of a benign Matrix?

Vint Cerf: Hmm, that's an intriguing question. I think there are some cool opportunities to link virtual and real reality, if I can say that - one can do simulations for instance in which some parts of the simulation are actually real - for example, remote devices such as telescopes and microscopes could be placed in what seems to be a virtual laboratory except that when you aim the virtual telescope, a real one is controlled and points to the place you pointed the virtual one and captures an image. I don't anticipate anything quite as elaborate as Matrix, and I think the virtual world of the net is not a substitute for the real world. In fact, I see people discovering more of the real world THROUGH the net - new friends to visit and new places to see. I guess the travel industry is going to benefit more from the Internet than almost any other segment of business!!!

drdre14_1985 asks: Will the Internet be made into our bodies, as you said in your Time article?

Vint Cerf: It's pretty speculative at this point whether nano-devices will in fact be built that can survive and do useful things (we hope) inside our bodies - but I would not rule this out. It will start with devices that are simply embedded in packages and activated as they pass through sensors - but as we gain experience with nanotechnology, I am persuaded that we may well see internet-enabled organisms inside our bodies - maybe in 2050 or later???

nnamdi27 asks: I've read articles where you mention something called the interplanetary Internet. What is it and how will it affect the future?

Vint Cerf: Well it is already affecting my PRESENT! I have been working for the last two years with a team of engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. We had the idea that we could serve space exploration better if we could standardize the way we communicate in space with various robots and space vehicles and exploratory spacecraft - such as the Mars rover that sent back such great pictures from the surface of Mars a couple of years ago. Up until now there was very little sharing of communication resources between missions, except for the deep space network (consisting of three huge antennas located in California, Australia and Spain. We have in mind to extend the Internet so it can work in outer space across interplanetary distances. Ordinary Internet will work well on spacecraft, on the surface of planets and moons, but it does not work well across interplanetary distances. For example, the round-trip time to Mars is about 40 minutes maximum and about 10 minutes minimum. So we've devised a new protocol to take traffic from planet-bound Internets all over the solar system and forward the traffic across an Interplanetary backbone we call InterPLAnet or IPN for short. We think it will take 20-40 years to build up a full interplanetary backbone but we expect the first two-planet Internet to consist of earth and mars no later than 2010.

rweisend asks: Do you support Internet taxes for electronic commerce?

Vint Cerf: That's a very good question. Here's how I think about it: the Internet is ultimately going to carry more than half, and possibly 90% of the world's business transactions. These transactions represent government revenues (for local, state and national governments), and if we don't find a reasonable way to tax them, money to run the government will dry up. Some people might welcome that, but I happen to think that we need government in some measure to maintain a civil society and we have to pay for it. If we don't tax transactions the same on the net and in "meat space" we will surely create artificial dislocations in the tax base and unnecessarily penalize the "bricks and mortar" part of our economy. So I am in favor of some kind of taxation, but I also agree with many business people that we should try to simplify the state and local tax codes to make it easier to apply taxes to online transactions.

draconette31163 asks: With Internet advancements, what type of employment possibilities do you believe would be available to "homeworkers" or telecommuters?

Vint Cerf: I think there will be alot of opportunities, and I'm starting to see some already. Some of the telecommuters will come from other countries - such as Bangalore, in India, where there are a good many well-trained engineers who have graduated from the Indian Institutes of Technology. A number of countries are beginning to see opportunity where the Internet has already penetrated deeply - as it has in the US with about 40% of homes and businesses online. Countries with skilled but low-cost labor forces will be able to export that labor without having the workers leave the country!

grant5 asks: What do you think about the future of distributed computing over the Internet? This is where many thousands of PCs each work on small pieces of a single large task (such as cracking encryption, or some other task that is usually reserved for traditional supercomputers).

Vint Cerf: There are some very good examples of this kind of computation already. the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) provides one good example. In that one, snippets of digitized radio signals received from skyward-looking radio telescopes are distributed to willing PCs around the net to search in parallel for anything "interesting" in the way of a signal. Another example is email which is a distributed computer. Napster and Gnutella are further (perhaps more troubling) examples. If we are going to rely heavily on distributed computing, we have to work harder to make the network and the hosts on it a lot more secure than they seem to be today - and I think this can be done if we make it a priority.

zooey_franny asks: How often do you surf the net?

zooey_franny asks: What are your favorite websites?

Vint Cerf:I think I must be online about 8 hours a day or more - I try to sleep as little as I can (because it is a waste of time), and I make very heavy use of the web search engines - Google is very impressive, and I find myself turning to that and AltaVista a lot. When I need some generic service, though, I find myself turning to Yahoo and its organized lists - when you are looking for a plumber, you don't care what his name is or even the name of his company but only that he does plumbing work and isn't too far away. That's not something that the text search engines can help much with.

sweet_lova_nick asks: what are your opinions about napster and other software sharing programs?

Vint Cerf: I oscillate about this - I'm still of the opinion that intellectual property needs some kind of protection or the incentives for its creation may vanish. However, I think we can't "erase" ideas like Napster and Gnutella - so we may need to think our way through new business models that take into account the new ways in which information can be replicated and shared.

lexi_40205 asks: Will the rest of the world have to learn American English to use the Internet? Can new Chinese- or French- or Spanish- language versions of the Net spring up?

Vint Cerf: There are already 10M Chinese in China using the net- and you can find a lot of French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Indian and so on. I think English will prove to be beneficial as a second language for business transactions but that there will be ample demand for localization of language for people for whom English is a second or third language. Ultimately, the net should be able to handle any language.

theresa_riley asks: Any predictions for 5 years from now? 10 years from now?

drdre14_1985 asks: Will there be anything to replace the Internet in the future??

Vint Cerf: Sure - five years from now there will be about 2.5 billion devices on the Internet including a lot of wireless gear. E-commerce will probably take up about 25% of the economy. There will be about the same number of users as there are devices on the net - maybe more, so we could be approaching 1.5 billion users by then. I expect that we will reach 3 billion users by 2010 and that by that time, the two planet Interplanetary Internet will be in operation reliably.

Timehost: We're going to have to wrap up soon...any closing thoughts?

Vint Cerf: I really appreciate the opportunity to engage in this conversation - somehow things are always a lot more interesting when the questions come from the rest of the participants rather than simply deciding what will be appropriate or interesting to any assembled group. I hope we will be able to do this again and that perhaps someday it will be possible to speak my answers and text will automatically be generated as a side-effect. Until then, thanks for sharing your keyboard and your time and thoughts with me. See you on the 'Net!!

Timehost: Thanks, we hope you'll come back soon...even before that technical advance!

Vint Cerf: I'm sure our paths will cross as Internet makes its way into the future.

Timehost: Thanks again!

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