Dr. Vinton Cerf - Internet, Infinity and Beyond - Page 6

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There have been a number of interesting effects that the Internet has illustrated especially over the past decade one of them is that the consumers of information on the Internet are now becoming the producers, we have the technology in hand and it's cheap for people to generate their own digital videos, to build their own blogs, for people to build their own web pages and so this is a major transformation because in the past all mass media were confined to the control of the small number of companies or small number of individuals it was hard to get control of the television channel or control of a newspaper or magazine, but in the Internet world anyone can be a publisher.

This transforms our online world into one of the most democratic instruments of information distribution and access that has ever been developed. The Internet Society has a motto ‘Internet is for everyone’ and their intent is that everyone should have equal access to Internet capability or at least equal opportunity to have access to it of course we are far from that with the 5.5 billion people who are not yet online but that's an objective. There are all kinds of way to take this types of technology and use it to transmit data for educational purposes when you think about the educational institutions typical format is for your college the degree program and things like that and yet we now see increasing need especially in industry for certificate programs for continuing education, for lifelong education all of these different alternatives ways of delivering educational material can be accomplished through the Internet.

One of the most interesting experiments along those lines is MIT which put all of its content up on the Internet basically at no charge. I think was a very clever marketing tactic because if you think about it if you look at what's up there from MIT one of two things is true. Either you already know what all that stuff means in which cases there’s no point to go to MIT or if you are not sure what means at all and MIT implicit message “if you don’t understand that stuff come to MIT and we will teach it to you”. So it's actually worked out very well even though MIT's contemporary’s this was really a crazy thing to do and why on earth would you risk all that intellectual property confusion. The answer is it's attracted a whole lot of new people to MIT.

The economics of the Internet and more generally the economics of digital communications and digital storage has been utterly transforming many of you have read the long tail argument about interest levels are low but are extensive for older and older material which can be true of movies true of songs and true of other refereed articles and other kinds of things in the research world.

In the physical world it's very hard to provide people with full access to all of the content that's ever been generated every song that's been produced every movie that's been produced, if you had to maintain a warehouse full of physical equipment or physical DVDs it would probably not be very economical especially if you'd needed to service a widely dispersed collection all possible buyers.

The Internet provides for low cost transmission and digital storage allows for very, very inexpensive ways of retaining copies of digitized material and you put that all online and you aggregate this thin possible market for the long tail for the things that are older and you actually make money out of that because the economics have changed. One of my favourite illustrations of the change in the cost of storage is to look back at 1979 when I bought 10 MB of disk storage for $1,000 in 1979, and I was pretty excited about getting that much storage in a shoebox size thing. I recently bought a terabyte of memory for $1,000 and bought it home and some of you will to get a cheaper. But then I wondered what would a terabyte of memory have cost me in 1979? If you do the maths its $100 million. Now in 1979 I didn't have $100 million and if I had a hundred million dollars it's pretty clear that my wife wouldn't let me spend it on a rotating disc storage's in any case.

The economics have changed so dramatically that the business models which were originally held companies together have actually been broken. And so this is what we're seeing now that things that used to be part of the fundamental revenue stream are evaporating. So voice over IP by way of example utterly transforms the business model it's now another thing on the net it doesn't cost you incrementally anymore it’s simply being on the network that's very different from charging per minute for access to that kind of application.

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