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Vint Cerf: Father Of The Internet
by Andrew Noyes
Vint Cerf, the silver-haired man known to many as the father of the Internet left his longtime post as chairman of the Internet Corporation for Names and Numbers on Friday. But he is positive that ICANN, which administers the Web-addressing system, will continue to thrive in his absence.
Cerf, who also serves as Google's chief Internet evangelist, reminisced about his near decade of ICANN service in a recent interview with Technology Daily. "I don't think of any of it as a personal success," he said. "If anything has worked out, it has been a result of a great deal of effort on a lot of people's part."
"The fact that ICANN has survived at all is pretty impressive, considering where it started," he said in a sit-down that preceded the group's 30th international meeting in Los Angeles last week. ICANN meets three times a year at destinations around the globe.
Parenting ICANN From Birth To Maturation
When Cerf joined the board, ICANN had little money, no business model "other than showing up, hat in hand," he recalls. The organization now is steadily funded and has dedicated great energy to ensuring transparency and public participation in its work. ICANN's maturation was not without controversy, Cerf admitted, but in fiscal 2008, it will have a budget of about $50 million.
"That is indicative of the expansion of the Internet itself and the growth of domain-name registration," he said.
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Cerf said the group has persevered despite numerous political challenges. Some international governments and members of the Internet community see ICANN as an arm of the U.S. government because of its ties to the Commerce Department.
"That is a very distorted and unfair assessment and there have been lawsuits that had the potential to be quite devastating to the organization," he said. "But ICANN is now viewed by most as part of a [global] governance spectrum that performs a vital function."
There are still many that want to see ICANN's work transferred to the International Telecommunication Union. "I would argue that we have credibly placed the organization into the governance structure in a way that is likely to stay," Cerf said.
Plenty of battles are on the horizon, he added. The transition to the next-generation Internet called Internet protocol version 6, is under way in the United States and elsewhere and making sure that system can run in parallel with the current system, known as IPv4, is "a big deal," Cerf said. ICANN also is rolling out Web addresses in other languages.
The group launched a testing phase for 11 languages last month and is moving toward full implementation for all languages, officials said. Cerf expects domain registrants to be able to file for suffixes in scripts other than Latin-based languages "sometime in the second half of 2008," and that trajectory may be hastened for some addresses that correspond with specific countries.
What The Future Holds For ICANN And Cerf
In March 2008, the Justice and Commerce departments will assess how well ICANN has met objectives set when the organization's formal relationship with the United States was crafted.
The possibility exists of relaxing or even eliminating ICANN's "special relationship" with Commerce and "achieving something more international," Cerf said. "The organization is well-prepared to cope with all of this and has a board that is very international in its scope."
When grilled about which members of the ICANN community have been the easiest and hardest to work with, Cerf would not answer directly. He said his response "depends a great deal on the specific topics involved."
"Registries and registrars are vigorous and vocal when issues arise that are of specific concern to them, but so is the GAC [Governmental Advisory Committee], the at-large community, the address-supporting organization and so on."
He added that "the entire range of constituencies [has] been very active, some more so on specific matters than others. The [Internet service providers] are probably the least vocal of the communities, and I wish they were more involved."
Cerf plans to stay active in ICANN after taking at least one year off and "not involving myself in any ICANN activity except on occasion to respond to e-mail or phone queries." He plans to write five books and do time-consuming work at Google.
But one final question had to be asked: Does a man who spends so much time focusing on the livelihood of Internet addresses own any domains of his own? Yes, and they reflect his humor. Cerf has registered CerfsUp.com, CerfsUp.net, CerfsUp.org and IPoneverything.com.
Stars Say 'Thank You' To Cerf
At ICANN's Los Angeles meeting, the group honored its outgoing leader with a gala at Sony Pictures Studios. Members of the ICANN community extended their thanks to Cerf for his service, and special guests videotaped testimonials.
Former Vice President Al Gore reminisced about Cerf's role in creating the Internet's protocols at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in the early 1970s and his leadership in establishing the first commercial e-mail service at MCI, which was later acquired by Verizon Communications.
Cerf's headship at ICANN has been based on "coordination, not control," Gore said. When the group was created, it was envisioned as an organization where the private sector led, and Cerf "has been a tireless advocate for that model," he added. "What ICANN led by Vint has achieved is truly fundamental. It means that day after day, people can continue to connect to each other."
Charles Elachi, director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said Cerf, who is a distinguished visiting scientist at the lab, "doesn't limit himself to being in California or part of the U.S. or in our planet. He wants to develop an Internet that is across the whole solar system" so that anyone can directly communicate with a spacecraft or rover. Elachi said he was proud to have Cerf on board, helping the lab "develop the next frontier" of the Internet.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt called Cerf his biggest hero and said he was "delighted" that ICANN has accomplished so much during Cerf's tenure. He said he also is excited to have Cerf back at Google full time, where he went to work in 2005 after resigning from MCI.
International greetings came from Tarek Kamel, Egypt's minister of communications and information technology, and European Union telecommunications chief Viviane Reding.
Kamel called Cerf "a great friend of Egypt" and lauded his attention to spreading the "know-how of the Internet worldwide" while "bridging the gap between the developed and developing world." Reding thanked him for "great professional and scientific contributions" and his work on non-ICANN related fronts like advocating for educational services for the hearing-impaired and the promotion of women in the science field.
"You leave ICANN a much stronger organization now than you had entered it," Reding said. The organization "has benefited much from the reputation and skills of its chairman."
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