insight 

We were delighted to welcome one of the ‘fathers of the internet’, Vint Cerf, to the Nominet offices in Oxford earlier today. As many will be aware, Vint was the co-designer of TCP/IP and basic infrastructure of the internet. After discussions about international developments and domain name developments in the UK, he very kindly offered to meet Nominet staff for a Q&A session. Questions posed to Vint included: IPv6 adoption, which he feels should be a matter of urgency, new top level domains - where the possibility of thousands of new suffixes raises concerns for brand holders, current internet risks - botnets, IPv4 exhaustion etc, etc, the future of the domain name system, Google’s position re search in the Chinese market and the new Google browser - which is open source. As always, Vint provided all the answers as well as some entertaining and interesting insights.

He then went on to give an excellent presentation at the Oxford Internet Institute on the future of the internet, noting that there are now 1,464 million internet users, which represents just 21% global penetration. He warned that IPv4 addresses will run out in the summer of 2010, which means that there needs to be a real push on IPv6 before it becomes a matter of dire urgency. He forsees geo-location based services growing rapidly as the number of mobile users increases and users will want local information directly relevant to their location. He also predicted the growth of the ‘internet of things’, where devices will increasingly link to the internet to deliver added value to users. I can see my family using the digital photo frame which automatically downloads and shares your latest snaps with friends and relatives, but probably not the electronic scales that link to your fridge in order to recommend heathier menus!

Vint also touched on the idea of an ‘interplanetary internet’, which I had previously thought of as an internet for the star ships and planets of the future. However, the penny dropped today when I understood that the protocols and tools being tested that facilitate connectivity over vast distances and frequent disruptions are of course the very things that could allow the global internet to be much more mobile and versatile in the future.