Vinton Cerf
Adam: I’m Adam Burns, and welcome to MeetTheBoss.tv. This week, I’m in Washington D.C. to talk with Dr. Vincent G. Cerf, Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, the company that took just 11 years to become verve. Cerf and Google are a really good fit because without him the Internet’s biggest brand wouldn’t exist. He and Robert Kahn designed the TCP/IP protocols that govern data transfer across the Net as well as its basic architecture. Both men were awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor, in 2005.
But I’m here to talk with Vint, as he’s more commonly known, about the Internet now in these tough economic times. Can this relatively new technology pull its weight as a job creator? What is it promising business moving forward? And with only 20 percent of the population having access to the Internet, is scalability gonna be the next big crunch?
So first of all, Dr. Cerf, thank you very much indeed for joining me this week. I’d like to ask you, if I may, a question asked by Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos who I spoke with the other day. He says, one, what’s it like to be the father of the Internet? And, two, do you hate that question?
Vint: Oh, well, I don’t hate the question. On the other hand, the title is wrong. I’m not the only father of the Internet. There are lots of people who’ve contributed. Most critically, of course, Robert Kahn, with whom I’ve been recognized many times together as the founders of Internet.
So this is very much a collaborative effort, and if you look at the history of the Internet, you’ll find that literally thousands of people have contributed over the years: tens of thousands – maybe by this time hundreds of thousands. You know what? This is one of those wonderful ideas where everyone has an opportunity to contribute, and they do! And that’s the real magic and power of the Internet. It’s an open environment that everyone has an opportunity to share in and to contribute to, and that’s exactly what’s happening.
Adam: You believe the backbone of the Internet, the actual delivery model, should have equal access for all, whereas the cable companies want to be able to charge for who gets access first and who gets access fastest. And my question then, perhaps playing devil’s advocate slightly, is isn’t the Internet a commodity, and, therefore, shouldn’t it be priced accordingly?
Vint: Okay, so we have to be really careful about words here, because terms like “equal” or “equal access” can sometimes be misconstrued, either deliberately or by accident, as meaning, “No one will have any better access than anyone else, and it’s all exactly uniform. No packets will ever be treated with any priority. They’re all uniformly treated. Oh, and, by the way, you’re not allowed to look at the packets to figure out whether there’s a denial-of-service attack.” None of those positions are correctly attributable to the people who speak about Net neutrality.
In fact, because that term has been so badly distorted, I’d like to suggest a different term, which is “nondiscriminatory access to the Internet.” So what does that mean? Well, it means that the supplier of the service should not be able to discriminate against you, as a user, or another party, as a supplier of applications, merely because of who you are or where you are. Now, you, as a consumer, might want more capacity than your neighbor next door, and it would – it’s quite reasonable for the supplier of the access to the Net to say, “Well, I am gonna have to charge you more for the larger capacity that you want compared to your neighbor.”
So we have no objections to that at all. The thing we worry about, however, is if the Internet supplier said, “I have a deal with Company X that’s offering service to the people who subscribe to my Internet access, and this deal means that we are going to deliver that party’s packets to you with higher priority or higher capacity than some other provider which you might want to get access to,” and our reaction to that is, “Wait a minute? That really impairs the ability of a new entrant in the market to offer a new product or a service.”
Adam: Is it the case – it would strike me that the backbone suppliers can see somebody like Google etching out a larger – ever-larger slice of the pie, and the profits and things that come from that – isn’t it business sense – common business sense for them to try and pushback on you and say, “Well, you’re using up more of our bandwidth. People are using you more than anything else; therefore, if you want that priority, you should pay”?
Vint: Okay, so I understand the argument, but it’s based on a rather flawed set of assumptions. That’s not a personal attack, by the way. It’s just an observation. Point number one, it’s not at all clear right now that the physical access to the Internet is a very competitive environment. You have to make investments in infrastructure – and, of course, this is part of the argument that some of the ISPs make along the lines that you just made, is that, “Well, we had to invest in this physical infrastructure. We should be free to do whatever we want to with it.” The problem is that may not produce the effect that you might want.
What we would like at Google is the effect that open innovation is facilitated, and it’s not gonna be facilitated if, for example, there is very little competition for physical access to the Net. If there were lots of competition – if there were 12 different suppliers of Internet access and the consumer – if the consumer thought, “Well, I’m not getting a fair treatment from this ISP, I can go to another one” – if you have lots of choice, then the competitive environment may discipline the behavior of the supplier.
Adam: Many of our viewers have businesses that don’t perhaps use the Internet as a primary income source. What should they be looking out for in terms of business enabling and enriching technologies?
Vint: I think what companies need to do is to examine the products and services that they offer and the means by which they make those things known to others and ask themselves, “How can the Internet enhance my ability to draw attention to my products and services, or even to deliver my products and services?” To give you just two examples, in the educational world, the product is education; it’s learning. And the question is, “Well, how do I deliver it?” And for many years the way you delivered it is, you know, a professor up on the podium and students sitting in chairs taking notes.
But we recognize that not everyone can afford to go to a four-year college and devote themselves exclusively to that. Sometimes people have to make a living, but they also have to learn new things because otherwise how will they maintain the edge that they need to maintain their skills for the jobs they’re doing or maybe even prepare themselves for new jobs. So the university, which is providing education as a product, needs to package not only the four-year degree and the two-year degree, but it needs to think about the two-week special course that you get a certificate in, or the two-month program to get an MBA – well, maybe it’s not two months, but it’s some period of time – not full-time.
So repackaging of the product of education and sometimes delivering it through the Network could be a very powerful revenue enhancer, to say nothing of growing a market that doesn’t exist compared to residential colleges. So that’s one kind of example. People increasingly rely on information in order to keep their lives organized, whether it’s calendars, or keeping track of their stocks, or now increasingly an interest in keeping track of medical records. Without going into a lot of detail – I don’t know – you probably have – may visit more than one doctor and your medical records are scattered around on physical paper in different offices.
And now when you go to another person who says, “I need to know what your medical record is,” you don’t have an easy way of gathering the data. So if we had common ability to record our personal medical records, we could supply that information more easily and accurately. Now, granted, financial information and medical information is highly personal and highly sensitive and something we absolutely wanna protect. But the idea here of making this information more easily discoverable for you, personally or analytically – analyzable – is a powerful tool.
This gets to what I think is an increasing understanding that computers, for the first time in human history, allow us to magnify and leverage our brain power, whereas in all the previous history what we’ve done is magnify and leverage our muscle power. So this is a big change in our human civilization where we’ve mechanized something that never has been mechanized before.
Adam: If we look at success stories of the past decade, Google is gonna rank pretty highly. What has the company done right?
Vint: One of the things that the company has done extraordinarily well is to deal with scale. When you look at the rate at which information flows into the Internet, and the rate at which it changes, and the rate at which Google has to keep track of all that, the ability to manage responsively – quickly – to all of that change and all of that increase is really stunning. When you look at the – walk into one of the Google data centers, which most people are not gonna be allowed to do, it’s awe-striking!
I mean, the scale – physical scale of the facilities, and the number of machines that are made to work together – both the hardware and the software – is frankly mind-blowing.
The willingness to share internal information with a fairly significant part of the entire company is another way in which the company manages to improve its likelihood of success. One thing I’ve learned about companies that are successful is that virtually every employee, whether they are cleaning the floors or the CEO and everything in between, have a pretty good idea of how the company makes money. And if people understand how the company works, then they can reasonably ask the question, and I hope they do, “Is what I’m doing today helping the company do what it’s trying to do?”
Google has one other advantage that has attracted me, and that is its basic model, which is to organize the world’s information and make it accessible and useful. That’s an honest motivation. It’s true. The company really believes that that’s what it wants to do, and that’s what people who work for Google want to make happen. I’m one of them, but just one of 20,000. It’s a wonderful feeling to have a company whose leadership believes that motto and wants to make it happen.
Adam: One last question: I heard recently – it could be an urban myth – that the Internet now has close to as many connections as the human brain and it’s only 5,000 days old. What do you think is gonna happen in the next 5,000 days?
Vint: Frequent speculation is that somehow or other as the Internet gets larger and larger and more computers and more software and more memory and everything else flow into it that someday it will simply wake up and become sentient – you know, self-aware.
I think, though – in my science-fiction speculative moments – I think that if the Internet could interact with the environment in ways like human beings interact that we might someday actually find that the Internet or its successor could become self-aware. But for me that’s still science fiction. But you can certainly see on another axis here that – independent of self-awareness – that the network and the sensory systems associated with it can have enormously more information than any individual human being could have and could process that information with all the huge computing power that’s available, and so that’s a different kind of intelligence than what you and I have.
We cannot cope with 50 petabytes of information. We just can’t, and yet the computing systems, in the aggregate, have the capacity to do things like that. So maybe there is an interesting kind of relationship which is growing between human beings and the networks and computers that we make use of every day. They do certain kinds of things that we can’t do, and we recognize patterns and discover things that the computers and the programs that run them can’t do, but can enable us to do.
Now, there is a gentleman, Ray Kurzweil, who wrote a book called The Singularity is Near, and in it he takes advantage of your observation, which is that computers have an increasingly large number of components, even a single machine, and that someday it will have more pieces than a human brain has, and that may actually cause it to become self-aware, or we might even be able to download ourselves into it, at which point we might ask whether we’ve just created our successor species, and we could wave goodbye to the human race.
That’s sort of a terrible way to end this conversation, but I think that’s very speculative. And in the meantime, I think we have an opportunity to take advantage of the computer power that is predictably going to be available to leverage, once again, the brains that we have by making them more capable than they ever have been in the past.
Adam: Dr. Cerf, thank you very much, indeed.
Vint: It’s a pleasure. Thank you.
Adam: Much appreciated.