Cerf: My name is Vint Cerf.
I'm Google's chief Internet evangelist.
Uh, and part of the reason that you're here
is that my mission in part
is to get more Internet built all around the world.
And your role in this, in part,
is to help us collectively understand what's happening
to the Internet
and to appreciate what we can do
to make more of it happen.
Some of you have come from very long distances,
and I deeply appreciate the effort
that you've gone to, uh, join us today.
Uh, for example, Alan Mauldin.
Where is Alan? There's Alan over here.
He came from Bratislava.
Uh, and, um, at least one other person
is coming from Europe who will be with us later on,
and that's Whit Diffie,
who is actually based here in the Bay Area,
but was in London yesterday, so...
And others of you I'm sure have traveled
at least from the east coast,
if not from other relatively far away places.
So I want to express my appreciation
for the effort put forth.
Uh, about, um, 25 of us in the room
are, uh, outside of Google, are non-Googlers,
and about 65, when they all get here,
are--are from Google.
Uh, our purpose today is to try to capture
objective and quantitative perspectives
on the state of the Internet.
And we're trying to do this on many different dimensions.
Uh, some of them legal,
statistical, uh, technological...
application space, and things of that sort.
And so I particularly appreciate people
who have taken the time to develop materials
for this particular event,
or at least to adapt what they have.
And I also want to emphasize something about the nature
of this two-day session.
It's my fault if you feel like--
if you're one of the participants in presenting--
that you didn't get very much time.
That's my fault.
Um, I tried to keep the presentation aspect
of this event relatively small
in the hope that we would have a lot of discussion.
And what I would like to see and hope will happen
is that we raise issues and have discussions
among the panelists and within--
with the other participants
so that we can eliminate issues
that might not otherwise have gotten consideration.
So, um, there's-- this structure
is long on discussion and short on presentation.
Also, in the interest of saving time,
I'm not going to ask everybody to identify themselves.
The usual thing is going around the room.
The side effect of that is that I would ask you
to go and introduce yourselves during the breaks
to somebody you don't recognize
and somebody you don't know that's in this meeting.
I fondly hope that there will be linkages established
as a consequence of this symposium
that will persist over time that will be beneficial
to all of you and to us as well.
Um, this-- because this format
is a little bit experimental,
uh, I am absolutely open to and encourage
critical remarks about the structure
and the organization.
And if you will share those with me,
I'd appreciate it.
If we deci-- if we conclude as a group
that we should do more of this,
um, we want to take your comments into account
and organize any subsequent sessions
in a way that we collectively think is an improvement.
Well, I'm going to spend just a few more minutes
trying to set the stage for what is going to unfold
over the next two days.
I am not going to go through the agenda.
Uh, you've seen that many times in your email.
And, uh, you'll see it on the board over there,
on the white board,
so I don't plan to go through that.
Um, the way I see it right now
is the Internet is at an important, um,
flex point, I think, in its history.
It's 2009.
Uh, we are experiencing some scaling issues,
which are in some ways not new, but persistent.
The network is much larger than it was ten years ago
or 20 or 30 years ago.
Um, we are plainly about to run out
of the allocable IPv4 address space.
We are not very far along
on the implementation and deployment
of IPv6, generally, in the network.
Uh, the ISPs have been very slow
to implement such a service.
Uh, and even if they did,
let's assume that tomorrow morning we woke up
and everybody was running IPv6.
The scaling of the routing system
to a network which is compatible
with the size of the IPv4 address space
is an open question, in my mind.
Uh, so, uh, scaling, in many different ways,
is still an important issue.
Bandwidth is another problem, space,
because the access speeds
are not uniformly high everywhere.
And as the applications increase their,
uh, the necess--the need for higher bandwidth,
the core will also experience
a need to increase its capacity.
Cloud computing is adding yet another dimension
to the way in which the Internet's being used.
We're, of course, major users
of cloud computing structures,
as our others in our universe.
And so those are all related
to scaling challenges of the Net.
Security and privacy are at the top
of many people's lists of problem areas
for the Internet.
Um, and some of you are particularly,
deeply concerned and interested in that.
I don't think that any of us, at least I don't,
see my way entirely clear
towards how those things are going to be resolved.
Um, intellectual property has become a major issue
in the Net.
And we'll spend some time on that tomorrow
when we get to some of the legal aspects
of Internet and issues that are arising.
Uh, it's a side effect in part of the fact
that it's so easy to duplicate
and distribute digital information.
Uh, the regimes of the past--
the copyright regimes
that controlled physical access to copies
is significantly eroded, let's say,
by the way in which the Internet,
and particularly the World Wide Web application, work.
I would say, similarly, e-commerce
is an increasingly important component of the Net.
And yet we are deeply concerned
about authenticity
and integrity of the transactions,
to say nothing of their confidentiality.
Uh, and finally, there's no question
that internationalization is an important element
in the Internet today and tomorrow.
Some of the statistics
that most of you will be familiar with
say that there are almost 700 million people on the Net
from Asia
and another 400 million in Europe,
for some definition of Europe,
uh, which keeps changing.
Um, and another 250 million or so in North America,
140 million in South America, and so on.
Uh, the internationalization of the Net
has many impacts.
One of them, of course,
is that the preferred languages
and scripts that are needed
to usefully apply the Internet
are changing well beyond the early stages of the Net,
when we used simple ASCII characters
as a way of putting information on the Net
and making references to things.
So now we're faced with bringing up scripts
for other languages.
The World Wide Web has done a good job,
for the most part, of accommodating that,
but the domain name system has not.
And so we're still in the throes
of trying to resolve how to make that work better.
Well, there are many, many other things
that I could say this morning,
but you didn't come here to listen to a preamble,
you came here to participate in a set of what I hope
are healthy and perhaps even exciting exchanges.
So I'd like to stop here.
Let me ask if there are any questions at this point
for anyone who's participating.
And if not--I don't see any hands going up.
Uh, we will move on now
to the first part of our agenda.
And that's to look at the Internet
from a statistical point of view.
And to do that, I'd like to invite Stephen Stuart
to come and chair this session.