Painting of Vint Cerf

Flickr CC: thierry ehrmann

Wired.com: So from the beginning, people, including yourself, had a vision of where the internet was going to go. Are you surprised, though, that, at this point, the IP protocol seems to beat almost anything it comes up against?

I'm not surprised at all because we designed it to do that.

This was very conscious. Something we did right at the very beginning, when we were writing the specifications, we wanted to make this a future-proof protocol. And so the tactic that we used to achieve this was to say that the protocol did not know how -- the packets of the internet protocol layer didn't know how they were being carried. And they didn't care whether it was a satellite link or mobile radio link or an optical fibre or something else.

We were very, very careful to isolate that protocol layer from any detailed knowledge of how it was being carried. Plainly, the software had to know how to inject it into a radio link, or inject it into an optical fibre, or inject it into a satellite connection. But the basic protocol didn't know how that worked.

And the other thing that we did was to make sure that the network didn't know what the packets had in them. We didn't encrypt them to prevent it from knowing -- we just didn't make it have to know anything. It's just a bag of bits as far as the net was concerned.

We were very successful in these two design features, because every time a new kind of communications technology came along, like frame relay or a synchronous transfer mode or passive optical networking or mobile radio -- all of these different ways of communicating could carry internet packets.

We would hear people saying, 'The internet will be replaced by X25,' or 'The internet will be replaced by frame relay,' or 'The internet will be replaced by APM,' or 'The internet will be replaced by add-and-drop multiplexers.'

Of course, the answer is, 'No, it won't.' It just runs on top of everything. And that was by design. I'm actually very proud of the fact that we thought of that and carefully designed that capability into the system.

Wired.com: Right. You mentioned TCP/IP not knowing what's within the packets. Are you concerned with the growth of things like Deep Packet Inspection and telecoms interested in having more control over their networks?

Yes, I am. I've been very noisy about that.

First of all, the DPI thing is easy to defeat. All you have to do is use end-to-end encryption. HTTPS is your friend in that case, or IPSEC is your friend. I don't object to DPI when you're trying to figure out what's wrong with a network.

I am worried about two things: one is the network neutrality issue. That's a business issue. The issue has to do with the lack of competition in broadband access and therefore, the lack of discipline in the market to competition. There is no discipline in the American market right now because there isn't enough facilities-based competition for broadband service.

And although the FCC has tried to introduce net neutrality rules to avoid abusive practices like favouring your own services over others, they have struggled because there has been more than one court case in which it was asserted the  FCC didn't have the authority to punish ISPs for abusing their control over the broadband channel. So, I think that's a serious problem.

The other thing I worry about is the introduction of IPv6 because technically we have run out of internet addresses -- even though the original design called for a 32-bit address, which would allowed for 4.3 trillion terminations if it had been efficiently used.

And we are clearly over-subscribed at this point. But it was only last year that we ran out. So one thing that I am anticipating is that on 6th June this year, all of those who can are going to turn on IPv6 capability.


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