Dr. Vinton Cerf - Internet, Infinity and Beyond - Page 7

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Internet spread in its use by the general public have introduced some risk factors, we all deplore the fact that spam seems to be everywhere that there are viruses and worms theres fraud and other kinds of abuse on the net there is misinformation that some people put up deliberately some put up only because of ignorance this is partly a side effect of the commercialization of the network it is partly a side effect of the general public being online and although I don’t argue that there's nothing that can be done about this in fact there is some very specific technical steps that we can take to reduce the effects of some of these annoying practices. In fact, we may also need to use legislation both on a national and even on an international scale in order to explain to people that certain things are going to be socially unacceptable and if we catch you doing them there will be consequences.

We've had to go through the same thing on other technologies for example, you can commit fraud with the Postal Service or the telephone system and that's illegal and if they catch you doing it you wind up going to jail or paying a fine or both. I’ve already focused pretty hard on the end to end principal and innovation at the edge and I just want to emphasize again how important it is to keep the network open to innovation so that new Google's and new Amazon’s and so on can be invented by young people with good ideas.

I’ve already mentioned mobiles a lot, I want to just suggest a couple of things Google is quite interested in being able to use the mobiles as a platform for delivering some of its products and services. Short messages could be used as a conduit to deliver queries to the Google search system and answers come back; some mobiles have already been enabled to do payments, transactions and to authorize various transactions; you have to admit though that mobiles present some challenges as interfaces. I carry a BlackBerry it's got a very small display the data rates that you can get over a BlackBerry will vary a lot from rather slow to relatively fast the keyboard is only suitable for people that are only three inches tall.

But it still represents a very important mechanism through which to offer new products and services, more interestingly many of these devices are outfitted with global positioning satellite detectors and so now the device now knows where it is, this enables questions like where's the nearest restaurant to be first of all a well formed questioned and second it's a question that has reasonable answers if you have geographical indexed information that associates places with what's going on there, what facilities and services that are available. This has led to some very visible increases in the value of geographically indexed databases so people that are willing to spend time to accumulate information that is associated with geographical location can actually monetize the value of that information and compensate for the work that they've done into collecting it.

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