Father of the internet, Vint Cerf, shared with the world how the internet today has evolved into something he never imagined while creating it close to 50 years ago.
Vint Cerf spoke about how the internet is breaking all barriers, connecting the world, but also raising safety risks and new dangers for netizens coming online -- especially in a country like India.
Also Read:?At 319 Tbps, Japan Sets Fastest Internet Speed World Record Across 3,000 Km
Currently performing the role of Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, Vint Cerf revealed his views of the internet in a keynote speech at a Google event that spoke about the spread of the internet in India, and the need for a safer internet for all.?
He expressed how the internet has spread beyond his expectations, stating, ¡°The internet we experience today has exceeded all my initial estimations. With lower barriers to internet access, users across the world have benefited, but bad actors have also gained entry.¡±
Speaking about the deep adoption of the internet with Indian citizens and the increased risk of danger, Vint Cerf shared, ¡°With the increasing user adoption and the contribution of digital connectivity in India¡¯s economy, we cannot take the internet for granted. Since the pandemic broke, there is a heightened need to strengthen safety and security, reliability and privacy, and the overall resilience of the internet and its applications.¡±
Vint Cerf asked for the creation of better tools to create a safer online experience, ¡°In addition to helping users build better digital skills, we need to develop tools to aid them in their quest for safety, so that companies, individuals, researchers, and governments can harness the internet for good, whilst protecting themselves from harm.¡±
Also Read:?38% Remote Workers Feel Employers Must Pay For Home Internet, Electricity Bills
At the event, Google shared how it had stepped up its commitment to online safely in India with some new programs and initiatives that were announced at this event like a new Google Safety Centre with support for 8 Indic languages, user education programs for enabling online safety for kids as well as teaming up with Amar Chitra Katha to create safety lessons through popular Indian comic book characters across eight languages -- Hindi, Marathi, Malayalam, Kannada, Telugu, Bengali, Tamil, and Gujarati.
Vint Cerf is popularly known as the ¡®Father of the Internet. He helped co-design the TCP/IP protocols and the preliminary architecture of the internet that we all adore today with Bob Kahn.?
Cerf started his career as US Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) which was instrumental in creating the internet as well as internet-related data packet and security technologies.?
Also Read: India Heading Towards China-Like Internet Regulation Model, Says CloudFlare CEO
He¡¯s been with Google since 2005 where he¡¯s helped identify new enabling technologies to create advanced internet-based products and services. He¡¯s also the recipient of the US National medal of Technology (in 1997), as well as the ACM Alan M. Turing award, which is also referred to as the Nobel Prize of Computer Science. He is also the recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George Bush.?
Today, when we think about the father of the internet, most people think about Tim Berners Lee, the man who created the World Wide Web.?
However, he¡¯s actually the father of the modern internet, with Vint Cerf being the one who created the way on which Tim Berners Lee could later create the 'world wide web' as we know it today. The TCP/IP protocols enabled computers to communicate with each other and share data among them efficiently across the world.?
Also Read:?Guy Who Built The Internet Says 2.2 Billion People Still Offline, Which Is Wrong
Both Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee have slightly different perspectives on how the internet should be. Tim Berners-Lee is of the opinion that we must look at decentralization of the internet from tech moguls like Facebook, Google and how the data should be in the control of the users via use of blockchain technologies, enhancing user privacy.?
Vint Cerf, however, has a reputation of a blockchain sceptic and he feels that this isn¡¯t the answer to having a safe internet experience for all -- what we need is stringent government regulation and laws in place for any bad actors to take advantage of users.
He said in a statement to Diginomica, ¡°I¡¯m a well-known Blockchain sceptic. It is, roughly speaking, a theoretically immutable distributed database, and it has some useful properties. But I have not seen it scale terribly well. I¡¯m not sure that blockchain is really going to change the Internet.¡±
Also Read:?Guy Who Built The Internet Has Made A Tool To Help You Control Your Online Data
He added, ¡°When you see a phenomenon like the Internet, which is rich in its evolution, new ideas, new applications, it is a very open architecture and invites people to invent new ways of using it. But this introduces new kinds of governance concerns: what we do about misinformation, about malware which is propagating through the network, about someone in one country who is harmed by someone in another.¡±
¡°For anyone who is interested in governance, there is simply a wide open space here for hard work and for international agreements, in order to manage this very complex and very rich environment that we call the Internet, and the World Wide Web.¡±