Internet pioneer Vint Cerf was in Dublin last week as part of his ongoing evangical mission to keep the internet open, free and available to all – and out of the clutches of over-zealous legislators and cyber-criminals, writes KARLIN LILLINGTON

VINT CERF ALWAYS has plenty of things to say about his fascinating, problematic, inspiring, economy-driving, and often unruly, baby.

Meaning, the internet, of course.

The man often called the “father of the internet” was in Ireland last week to talk about his digital offspring, wearing his current hat of vice president and “Chief Internet Evangelist” (yes, really) for Google.

Fielding questions at Google’s Dublin headquarters, Cerf is keen to encourage Ireland’s longtime policy of promoting the development of an information technology economy. The more activity in the IT industry in Ireland, “the more opportunity to be helpful to other people”– to supply the services and products that an increasingly technology-focused world wants and needs, he says.

He notes that more than 7 per cent of the UK’s economic activity comes from the IT and internet sector, an indication of how critical and fruitful such activity can be for economic growth.

His own take is that Ireland has had a fair amount of “thoughtful preparation” over the years to encourage IT companies to base themselves here, he says.

The more development there is on the internet, the more opportunity for third parties to offer services, he notes. Currently, the number of people and machines on the internet grows by 15 per cent annually – “basically in line to put everyone on the planet online by the end of the decade.” The cost of internet enabling anything is dropping, he says, with massive implications for research, business, communications and entrepreneurship.

But this massive expansion puts increasing strain on the internet’s infrastructure. Many have called for a complete overhaul of the internet, and there are numerous projects underway – including collaborative research at the Waterford Institute of Technology – to design an alternative net that would not rely on the TCP/IP communications protocol that was invented by Cerf and Bob Kahn in 1969, and is the data-transfer foundation on which the entire -nternet is structured.

Does he feel his TCP/IP protocol has had its day, after 40-plus years? Absolutely not, he says impishly. “We are seeing dramatic potential changes in networking,” he says. “Times are changing. New opportunities are approaching. The internet is evolving.”

To start with, to keep pace with the explosion of people, machines, phones, sensors, and anything else that can get online, a new form of internet addressing, called IPv6 (internet protocol version 6), has been introduced to increase the number of addresses that can be given out to individual locations on the net.

Although there has been some reluctance in the broad net community to move to adopt IPv6, Cerf insists it is absolutely mandatory to prepare for the launch date for the protocol on June 6th of this year.

He also points to fresh technologies such as the OpenFlow protocol, which uses software working on the net’s routers to enable better data-traffic management across the network. Using such techniques, Cerf says, “you’ve extended the way in which information gets sent”.

Keeping an open, uncensored internet is extremely important to Cerf. He was back in the public eye over the past year, encouraging internet users to oppose the Stop Online Privacy Act (Sopa) and Protect IP Act (Pipa) proposed legislation in the United States, both of which were eventually abandoned. He sent a public letter to US Representative Lamar S Smith, the legislator responsible for the Sopa Bill, arguing that it would create dangerous, “unprecedented censorship” of the internet, and had high-profile involvement with Google’s online campaign and petition to stop the bill.

More recently, he sent an email to millions of people who signed the Google petition, asking them to get involved in an initiative to think about what the internet means and what it should be, opening up a discussion across social media using the hashtag #ourweb.

“This open, free internet is under threat – for some understandable reasons, and some less so. There are a lot of bad things that happen on the internet, and this is an inescapable side of things. We try to introduce technical means of addressing this,” he says, but he notes that the internet is only one of many other avenues for abuse and criminality, and should not be singled out for draconian restraints that limit its overall use and functionality.

Rather than introducing blanket approach bills like Sopa, that Cerf believes can hinder and stifle the benefits – including the economic role – of the internet, he would rather see the development of technical means to prevent the abuse in the first place, and for detection and response or punishment as needed.

He acknowledges that countering the bad guys can be difficult, given that anonymity is an integral part of the internet, structured in by US military research agency Darpa as a key element of the network way back when. For a reason to continue to support this element, Cerf notes that an anonymous internet allows for freedom of political speech and for human-rights activism. But, he says, anonymity also offers the potential for abuse.

There’s no easy solution: “So that tension is going to be with us for quite some time.”

On the economic reasons for maintaining an open internet, he says it is essential for preserving “permissionless innovation” – the ability to use the fathomless resources of the net to offer new services and products.

“That’s important – that’s where the next Google comes from,” he argues.

Making data freely available online enables the creative use of pattern searching – critical to Google’s business model of analysing its users’ search patterns (which he argues is a benign analytical process, not one in which private data is misused – a core dispute that Google continues to have with regulators in Europe).

On the other hand, he bristles at the proposed “right to forget” element of proposed EU new data-protection legislation, which he feels is an attempt to “somehow erase the net”, as well as being unworkable.

All of these issues, though, are central to necessary discussions as society figures out what the norms are for a now-pervasive online world that barely existed 15 years ago, he says.

“The online environment invites all sorts of social blunders, and we have neither the tools nor intuitions to understand what the social norms should be,” he says. “I think we have to learn what social norms make sense in this digital world.”

A digital world, of course, that is significantly of his own making.

It must be strange sometimes to be the father of the internet – and therefore, father of a revolution in which billions of us around the world are players.

Father of the internet, evangelist of the future who is vint cerf?

VINTON CERF IS widely known as the "father of the internet" for his graduate work in 1969 with fellow student Bob Kahn at UCLA, creating one of the essential pieces of the Internet, the TCP/IP protocol.

This allows computers to talk to each other and send data across what was initially a small experimental network of just a few "nodes", or endpoints. Little did they know that this US government- based research project would turn into the global medium for communication (and of course, essential sneezing panda videos).

Cerf's resumé is wide and varied, running from internet development work with Darpa (the US Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency), to key executive roles with former communications giant MCI, advisory work with Nasa to develop the Interplanetary Internet, chairman of the central body for overseeing the internet, ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), and his current position as vice president and "chief internet evangelist" for Google, a role he took up in 2005.

He also has had close ties with Ireland. In the late 1990s, he served twice on then minister for communications Mary O'Rourke's Advisory Committee on Telecommunications (ACT), which produced two influential reports for the government on telecommunications and broadband policy. He still visits Ireland regularly, virtually or in person, he says.

Seemingly tireless, Cerf has a fierce and wide-ranging intellect, an endless enthusiasm for all things digital, and the gift of making very complex subjects easy to understand and exciting for a general audience. He was in Dublin last week to visit Google's Irish operations and to give a talk on the future of the internet.