Internet - Mirror of Mankind

Heather C. Devine, Associate, Fasken Martineau DuMoulin LLP and Director, The Empire Club of Canada; Avrum Laurie, Honours OAC Student, North Toronto Collegiate Institute; The Reverend Vic Reigel, Christ Church, Brampton; Tom Copeland, Chairperson, Canadian Association of Internet Providers; Robert Quance, Vice-President, International Sales, WorIdCom Canada Ltd.; John C. Koopman, Partner, Heidrick & Struggles and 1st Vice-President, The Empire Club of Canada; Derek K. Chan, Student of Computer Engineering, McMaster University; and Kevin Sheldon, Vice-President, International Sales, WorIdCom Inc.

Introduction by Ann Curran

Prior to our luncheons it is not unusual for me to go to a corporate Web site, download some relevant information from our speaker's biography and incorporate it into my introduction.

Let me tell you that was no easy task when it came to today's speaker. He has done so much it is hard to know where to begin. Where as most professionals have one biography Vinton Cerf has three. That's right--three. This man has accomplished so much that

November 14, 2002

he has a professional CV, a professional biography and a personal biography. His professional CV alone covers 10 pages.

I'm going to give you a very brief overview but encourage all of you to visit our Web site to appreciate the numerous awards, nine honorary degrees from around the world and 53 publications this man has under his belt.

Vinton G. Cerf was born in New Haven, CT on June 23, 1943. He has a BSc in Math and Computer Science from Stanford University, Stanford, CA 1965, a MSc in Computer Science from the University of California, Los Angeles, CA 1970 and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Los Angeles, CA 1972.

Since November 1999, Vinton Cerf has been the Senior Vice-President of Architecture and Technology for WorIdCom. Dr. Cerfs team of architects and engineers design advanced networking frameworks including Internet-based solutions for delivering a combination of data, information, voice and video services for business and consumer use.

Widely known as one of the "Fathers of the Internet," Dr. Cerf is the co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols--the method by which data moves around the Net--and the architecture of the Internet. In December 1997, President Clinton presented the U.S. National Medal of Technology to Vinton Cerf and his partner, Robert E. Kahn, for founding and developing the Internet.

While most people would have rested on their laurels after such an accomplishment, Dr. Cerf remains committed to extending the tremendous gains of the digital age. He is deeply involved in the day-to-day business of building the future--from the infrastructure for e-business, to the wireless Web, to the next-generation Internet and beyond.

In his address to us today, Dr. Cerf will review the current status and scale of the Internet and some of the applications that are driving its further development. He will discuss the multi-faceted use of the network as video, voice and data are carried as packets through a common infrastructure, the regulatory side effects and the economic factors that will also play a defining role in the network's evolution.

Dr. Cerf will also offer a status report on the design and implementation of an interplanetary extension of the Internet. This project at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology is part of a more general effort to upgrade the Deep Space Network (now called the Interplanetary Network).

Without further ado I give you Dr. Vinton Cerf.

Vinton Cerf

Madam Chairman, Mr. President, distinguished guests, members of the Empire Club, ladies and gentlemen, I feel very honoured to have this opportunity to address the Empire Club. It is truly humbling to read the list of your previous guest speakers and I consider it a special privilege to stand where so many have stood before.

My topic today is the Internet. What is its status today? What can we learn from its nearly 40 years of development? What issues does it raise today and will it likely raise in the future? And what can we say about that future, here on planet Earth and in the rest of the solar system? I will try to touch on many of these points in the time available.

To begin with, it is important to remember that the Internet is not one network but rather a network of networks. It was conceived as such in 1973, when Robert Kahn and I first started working on its design, developing these concepts from the foundations laid by its progenitor, the ARPANET, that was developed in the late 1960s and was itself based on concepts explored in the early parts of that decade by a number of researchers interested in data communications and in particular what we now call "packet switching."

The multi-network architecture of the Internet has allowed it to grow by the aggregation of an increasing number of networks into its structure. I would estimate that there are probably hundreds of thousands of networks making up the public Internet today, including a great many small, private networks in homes and enterprises, as well as globe-girdling backbones owned and operated by major telecommunications carriers.

At the core of the network's design is the so-called Internet Protocol or "IR" It is the principal element that all computers participating in the Internet have in common. It is this protocol and its associated address structure

that enable all the networks and hosts at the edges of the Internet to communicate with each other.

It was estimated in May 2002 that there were about 580 million users on the Internet, having grown to that scale from about 50 million in July 1997. Of those nearly 600 million users, about a third are in North America, a third in Europe and a third in the rest of the world. In roughly the same five-year interval, the number of servers on the Internet grew from 22.5 million to about 162 million, not counting a likely much larger number of PCs and other client devices including Internet mobile phones and personal digital assistants. While these statistics are small relative to the world's population, they are still impressive for their absolute magnitude. My estimates are that the number of users on the Internet will increase to as many as 2.2 billion by the year 2010. The number of devices on the Internet is also likely to increase dramatically over the next several years with an estimated 2.4 billion devices by 2006, including about 1.5 billion Internet-enabled mobiles and 900 million other clients and servers.

Indeed, it appears almost certain that a very large number of devices will find their way onto the Internet, including a good many household items including refrigerators, picture frames, washing machines, television sets, and ordinary desk telephones. Outfitted with a barcode scanner, an Internet-enabled refrigerator would know what was inside itself by scanning barcode labels as items are put inside. It could use this information to surf the Internet for recipes it knows could be made with the refrigerator's contents and display these on its flat panel display when you return home from work. Of course you might receive an e-mail from your refrigerator while you are on vacation warning you that the milk is three weeks old and about to walk out on its own if you don't come back and do something about it. Or perhaps the refrigerator will page you while you are grocery shopping to remind you to pick up the marinara sauce for a spaghetti dinner it suggests you can make.

The Japanese have developed an Internet-enabled bathroom scale that sends your weight to the doctor when you step on the scale. What happens if the refrigerator gets the same information? Will you come home to see diet recipes on display? Or perhaps the refrigerator will simply refuse to open because it knows you are on a diet.

I opened a bottle of wine recently only to discover that it had turned bad. I began to speculate on how information might be captured and stored in a passive memory in the wine cork itself. Similar devices are used in toll-road applications, for example, to respond to a stimulus to emit a stored billing identifier. One could imagine a memory device in each wine cork that could track location, temperature, humidity and date/time information that is periodically updated by the wine-storage system. When you open the wine and it's bad, you could interrogate the cork to find out the history of the wine's making and storage. While this is, of course, rather a flippant idea, similar concerns about food and drug storage are of more interest, to say nothing, in general, of capturing repair and usage history for any of a variety of appliances and vehicles. Placing a "memory patch" on any tool or item and using that to record history may be a very useful concept. Obviously, one might need to use digital signature technology to identify and authenticate the source of the records and also to confirm that the record had retained its integrity (that is, was not subject to tampering). One concrete example of such a technology is an uneraseable optical storage medium.

I think it is quite reasonable to anticipate that billions of devices will be Internet-enabled over the course of the next two decades and that we may find scores if not hundreds or even thousands of such devices per person on the network.

I would like to turn to a very different set of topics in the time I have remaining. In particular, I want to draw attention to the growing importance of policy issues surrounding the development and use of technology. As important and as challenging as technology development and deployment has been for the Internet, it seems to me that policy issues now outweigh technology in terms of the challenge they pose to lawmakers, law enforcers and citizens.

A representative list of policy issues surrounding the Internet would have to include privacy, security, intellectual property protections, domain name assignment, Internet address allocation, e-business dispute resolution, dealing with on-line fraud and other abuse (such as spam), censorship, taxation, regulatory policies especially as related to broadband access, and cryptography and its use and/or export. And this is plainly only a partial list of a much longer collection of topics that either now or will in the future challenge lawmakers. There are business-model questions that might not quite fall into the policy category but come close. I would like to spend some time on these as well.

Taking business models first, the Internet is driving the telecommunications environment towards fixed-price services. Not simply flat-rate but fixed-price. Dedicated access links to the Internet are already fixed-price. Services that were historically rated per minute and are shifting to fixed-price frameworks. Even in mobile telephony, we are seeing an increasing number of minutes made available for a fixed price per month after which charges per minute apply As we move towards the use of the Internet for all media (radio, TV, telephony, etc.) its fixed-price service model will apply to all of these services as well. It is possible to augment the fixed-price model with transaction fees (pay per view, pay per download), but many traditionally priced per-minute services will fall into fixed-price structures when transported over the Internet.

This trend suggests that a re-examination of many business models will be induced by the adoption of the Internet as an underlying transport medium. The cost of keeping track of every packet sent on the Internet seems incompatible with the highly competitive Internet environment of today. In recognition of this trend, and the migration of voice services onto the Internet or Internet-based backbones, WorldCom has already adopted such a model for its consumer Neighborhood service and its business Connections service.

Turning to regulatory policy, the Internet can potentially introduce a dramatic change in perspective. Historically, telecommunication services have tended to be integrally bound to particular transport technologies. Telephony by twisted pair copper (at least in the last mile), radio by over-the-air signalling and, in the case of television, cable, terrestrial and satellite radio. These transmission methods are typically operated by monopoly providers (exclusive cable franchises, exclusive radio licenses, exclusive satellite channels, exclusive ownership of twisted pair copper resources, etc.). The services and the bearing carriers have typically been regulated as a package. But the Internet has the potential to change that. Virtually all of these services can be packetized and carried over the Internet. Consequently, the need to regulate the service may be eliminated and attention paid simply to the underlying transport system. If the system represents a monopoly bottleneck, it may need regulatory oversight to prevent anti-competitive abuse of control over the resource.

If I had a choice, I would very much like to see something happen in the Internet market that happened in the telephony world of the early 1980s. At that time, AT&T was the primary provider of telephony services in the United States. MCI argued that every subscriber should

have the choice of using AT&T or MCI or other inter-exchange carrier and that this choice should be made by registration so that dialing a "1" would automatically select the inter-exchange carrier of choice, not only AT&T as had been the case.

The idea of choice suggests a regulatory framework for the Internet: subscribers should be able to reach any Internet Service Provider (ISP) over any access medium (cable, dial up, dedicated DSL, satellite, etc.). This is largely true for dial-up services. Any subscriber can reach any ISP over the public switched telephone network. I think this should be the case for all access methods. If we were to pursue these regulatory objectives, Internet services would be highly competitive over all media, subscribers would be guaranteed choice on any one medium and the actual application (television, radio, etc) would become an unregulated service.

In the United States it is often argued that cable modem service, digital subscriber loops and digital satellite all compete head-to-head for high bandwidth Internet subscribers. The facts suggest, however, that cable is largely a consumer service and that it is common that where cable Internet service is available, Digital Subscriber Loop service often is not. Thus these two media do not really compete. Similarly, digital satellite access to Internet services is often not available where DSL or cable service is offered. While this may change in the future, at the present it would appear that a better competition policy would open up these media to all ISPs rather than exclusively tying a single ISP, associated with the transmission provider, to the access medium. The refocusing on regulatory scrutiny on bottleneck transport systems that support Internet without prejudice to the supported applications is a significant but necessary change from present-day practices, in my estimation.

One of the other characteristics of most of the present-day broadband Internet access services is asymmetry. Cable modems support much higher data rates from the network than to the network. Similarly for DSL and digital satellite. Until symmetric broadband services are available to customers, a number of server-based or peer-to-peer applications will not find fruition. Once services such as gigabit ethernet are accessible, users will be able to transmit as much as they receive, making residential servers a reality. Once upon a time it was speculated that no one would want a computer in his or her home. Now they are quite common and home servers may well be another surprise in the making.

Taxation is another contested policy area with strong arguments and feelings on all sides. The debates frequently centre on whether on-line transactions should bear sales or value-added taxes like their "real-world" counterparts. Even if the argument is accepted that transactions should be treated the same, no matter how they are conducted, there are complications. In the United States, for example, sales taxes are imposed in each state. In the real world, it is generally the point of sale that determines the nexus of the transaction. For transactions occurring in brick and mortar stores, location is generally clear, but for transactions consummated in cyberspace, it is not clear where the transaction should be deemed to have taken place. What one needs is an unambiguous way of deciding where each transaction has occurred.

One way to do this is to use the billing address of a credit card used to pay for the transaction as the location at which the transaction occurs. While there may be some infirmities with this idea, it does have the advantage of being unambiguous. Of course, this might lead to all kinds of schemes to register credit cards with billing addresses in favourable tax locations.

In my opinion, it is vital to develop a workable solution to this problem. If it is policy that on-line transactions are not taxed and an increasing fraction of transactions take place on-line, eventually that tax revenue will erode away,

with all the negative consequences of the loss of an important revenue stream for state or municipal government.

Finally, in this discussion of policy, let me tackle censorship. Every Internet user is by now very aware of the diversity of content on the Internet. Our e-mails consist of significant amounts of unsolicited spam and the World Wide Web is filled with unsavory material. Efforts to curb Internet content have been made in many countries, mostly to little effect. In the U.S., laws that would require filtering of Internet content have twice been struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court as violations of the U.S. Constitution's first amendment. Similar efforts have been launched in Australia, France, Germany, Singapore, China, but with limited effect.

Like a piece of paper, the Internet does not know what is written on it. We are the writers on that blank paper. In truth, the Internet can be compared to a kind of mirror--it mirrors the interests of its users. With the rapid spread of access to the Internet, it has become clear that the Internet is now a mirror of mankind. If we do not like what we see in the mirror, the solution is not to re-touch the image in the mirror. Rather we must make ourselves over if we want the image to change. In the meantime, the Internet will continue to show us all aspects of our global society--the good, the bad and the ugly. As I use the Internet, I find a great deal of content to be admired, treasured and valued. I am persuaded that there is a lot more good to be obtained from a free flow of information than is to be gained by attempting to control Internet content--something that can easily stifle the very creativity that brought the Internet into being and sustains its growth today.

Technically it is very difficult to limit access to Internet content in a fair and equitable way. For one thing, at the level of operation of the ISPs, blocking access to Web sites tends to affect all users, including those outside the jurisdiction of the blocking agent. This extraterritoriality creates thorny legal precedents. The instruments available are blunt. If it were possible, a better strategy would be to filter content at the point of reception, but the technology of such filtering is still uncertain in its quality. Other attempts to identify the location of users so as to tailor Internet content presentation have been only partially successful.

Perhaps the price of an open Internet is the ability to see and hear some things we don't agree with. Critical thinking about what we see and hear may be the ultimate filter--something we can usefully teach our children and their children.

Switching now to my final topic--the expansion of the Internet into the solar system. For several decades, we have been exploring our solar system using powerful robots. The Deep Space Network (DSN) operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California is used to communicate with spacecraft that are moving past the planets, orbiting them and even landing on them. While efforts have been made to standardize the link level communication protocols used for deep space exploration, further standardization is required.

We can foresee a time when many robotic missions will be in operation concurrently, all requiring communication resources to return information and to receive new commands. Today, the mainstay of NASA's deep space system is JPL's DSN. The system is scheduled manually with enormous care and a great deal of effort. At JPL, a small engineering team in which I participate, has proposed a new set of protocols intended to ease the burden of scheduling the deep-space communication assets as well as those on board robots on the ground or in orbit around the planets. The conventional Internet TCP/IP protocols simply do not work well when the round-trip times are on the order of minutes to hours and potential discontinuity of communication could last for long periods of

time. The team has developed protocols to extend the Internet concept to include the Solar System, overcoming the inability of today's standard Internet protocols to operate under conditions of high delay, frequent discontinuity, variable and asymmetric data rates, etc.

By outfitting each mission with a standard suite of protocols suitable for such operation, a backbone network can be accreted over time, each new mission supporting the communication needs of the next ones. The idea is not to build a backbone network in space and hope that it will be used. Rather, each new mission that is launched for sound scientific reasons would carry standardized software that allows all platforms to interwork and to make use of existing assets to support communication requirements.

If all goes well, we might anticipate a two-planet Internet in operation as early as the end of the decade, in 2010.

The appreciation of the meeting was expressed by Heather C. Devine, Associate, Fasken Martineau DuMoulin LLP and Director, The Empire Club of Canada.