John Collins

Vint Cerf has long been known as "father of the internet", and with good reason. During his time at Stanford University and subsequently at the US department of defence in the 1970s, he drew up many of the specifications for the network that eventually became the modern internet. He was credited with being one of the inventors of the TCP/IP protocol, which is still the basis for how data is sent over the internet.

Last September, he joined Google as its chief internet evangelist. Looking at the perfectly groomed 62-year-old, in a three-piece suit complete with tie pin and cuff links, moving through Google's Dublin office last week, the title "grandfather of Google" seems more suitable these days.

An intellectual and technical heavyweight with a gift for making complicated concepts easily understood by the lay person, the man with a 35-year career at the cutting edge of networking may seem like an unlikely fit with the eight-year-old upstart that has taken the internet by storm.

"I go around trying to persuade people to build more internet," explains Cerf matter of factly. "For us at Google, that's important. There's only a billion users of the internet right now and that's only about 15 per cent of the world's population. The more users there are of the internet, the better it is for Google because that suits our business model. More people means more opportunities for clicking on ads among other things."

With his experience of private and public sector telecommunications - he worked for MCI for years, but also served as a government adviser - Cerf has come to the conclusion that governments need to intervene in markets if broadband is to be ubiquitous. Without their intervention, he feels telcos will just cherry pick the most profitable markets.

"We've had debates on this point in the US," says Cerf. "For many years we had something called the universal service requirement. It was a tax, intended to be spent creating rural facilities. Its incarnation was in 1934 and it was focused on telephony. I think we should reinstate the concept, our objective being to get broadband internet to everyone in the rural areas."

In the absence of such a model, many central and local governments have decided to build their own networks. In Ireland, we have the metropolitan area networks, designed to support broadband uptake in the regions. In the US, the focus is on building wireless networks in cities so citizens can have access at home and on the move. Google and Earthlink are bidding to build San Francisco's Wi-Fi network.

"We hear complaints along the lines of that being government competing with the private sector and that's a bad thing," says Cerf. "But if you actually look at what happens when a municipality wants to build a network, they will go the private sector and get it to build and probably operate it for them. So it's really a private sector initiative that's paid for by local government money."

Cerf is confident these economic and policy issues can be overcome, and excited about advances in technology such as the ability to deliver broadband to homes over the electricity network. As a result, he suggests, the numbers using the internet could triple to three billion, or half the world's population, by the end of 2010. More interestingly, he suggests there could be 100 times as many devices connected to the network by then.

This could include clothing that monitors a person's vital signs, entertainment, security and heating devices in the home, key systems in cars - Cerf gives the personal example of his modest wine cellar and the range of monitoring devices he might want connected to the network.

The major issue with three billion people and 300 billion devices on the internet is that the current version of the protocol that Cerf and his colleagues use - internet protocol (IP) version four - only allows for 4.3 billion unique addresses. As a result, Cerf is one of those pushing for a move to IP version six (v6), which among other things provides for a massive increase in the number of available addresses.

"I'm now a huge proponent of moving the whole thing over to IP v6," says Cerf. "Not everyone agrees with me but I'm going to keep pounding away at the table and I'll continue to be persistent. I don't want us to be stunned and surprised by running out of addresses."

Cerf is also not afraid to tackle the thorny issue of Google censoring its search results in China head on. He says it was one of the most difficult decisions Google had to make and one it agonised about for more than a year.

"Censorship, especially government-sponsored censorship, is anathema, especially for those of us who come from the United States where freedom of speech is such a critical part of our constitution," says Cerf. "But China isn't the United States and it's not reasonable for us to expect that every country in the world would necessarily adopt the same practices we are enjoying. We can choose not to show up as a company, but we have no control over where internet users come from. So to deliberately not service a portion of the internet community because of the attitude we might have about government censorship is counter to trying to run an important business."

He feels that, because Google won the right to show when it has censored results, it is helping to bring Chinese state censorship into the open. It also decided not to offer applications that gather users' personal information, such as Gmail and Google Talk, to avoid the possibility of data being subpoenaed as has happened to competitors such as Microsoft and Yahoo!.

Cerf is no stranger to Ireland, having served as a member of the Advisory Committee on Telecommunications that advised the Government on restructuring telecoms infrastructure in the late 1990s. Having lunched with Minister for Communications Noel Dempsey the previous day, he describes the Government as having a "lot of interest and depth of understanding of the power of technology".

He also feels that Google's Irish operation, with its multicultural workforce and support for customers across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, will play a key role in helping the company deal with cultural issues as it expands around the globe.

"If there is a belief that all of Google is summed up by an American perspective, I think we are deliberately trying hard to make that not true," he says. "We are trying to feed into the Google enterprise other perspectives in addition to those from the US . I think that's pretty significant because the way people treat information varies from culture to culture."