VINT CERF, CHIEF INTERNET EVANGELIST, GOOGLE

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VINT CERF, CHIEF INTERNET EVANGELIST, GOOGLE, IS INTERVIEWED AT BLOOMBERG TV

JULY 11, 2011

SPEAKERS: EMILY CHANG, BLOOMBERG NEWS ANCHOR

CORY JOHNSON, BLOOMBERG NEWS ANCHOR

VINT CERF, CHIEF INTERNET EVANGELIST, GOOGLE

18:12

EMILY CHANG, BLOOMBERG NEWS ANCHOR: Now some call him a founding father of the internet. Google calls him its chief internet evangelist. Today he's just the judge for students brave enough to present their science fair projects at the Google Science Fair. Vint Cerf, who is recognized along with a colleague for designing and building the framework for the web, joins us now on "Bloomberg West" from Mountain View, California. And Vint, such an honor to have you here on the program. Welcome. First of all I want to ask you -

VINT CERF, CHIEF INTERNET EVANGELIST, GOOGLE: I'm delighted to be here. Thank you.

CHANG: Wonderful. I want to ask you about the science fair. When you are evaluating projects there, what are you looking for and what's the most exciting you've seen so far?

CERF: Well, first of all what we're looking for is originality, an ability to pursue a project to its completion, an ability to explain what this project is all about, to articulate and to show why the results are important. And finally, scientific process. Did they follow scientific methods? Did they have a hypothesis? Did they test that hypothesis? Did they get the results that are properly calibrated? I have - I am - we're still in the middle of evaluating all of the finalists. There were 15 of them. So I'm not going to pick on any particular ones in this broadcast out of a concern that I'm a judge and I don't want to be misrepresented or anything.

But I can tell you these kids are doing absolutely college level and in some case graduate-level work. The projects are - range from mechanical to biological to analytical. Some of them are software. Some of them are mechanical design. Frankly it is enormously satisfying to realize that there are young people in the world today who have the same kind of originality and creativity which has driven many economies, and particularly ours here in the United States.

CHANG: Well we'll be anxious to see who the winner is. I want to ask you about Google's latest product, Google Plus. How do you see a service like Google Plus fitting into the future of social networking along with Facebook and Twitter?

CERF: Well - well, first of all it's very clear that Google Plus is one of the social networking contributions that Google has made. And our purpose in fact is to integrate more fully all the various applications that people enjoy today. You'll notice that one of the important themes of the current crop of Google applications is collaboration, the ability to share information and to work together. Google Plus is an avenue for enhancing that kind of collaboration and discovery of mutual interests.

And one of the things that is part of the design includes circles, which means that you can associate various of your friends in very different ways. You may have the same friend in different circles. You may have different friends that are part of the same circle. You have different reasons for wanting to associate various of your friends and colleagues together. So this tool is intended to permit that degree of flexibility.

CHANG: Now Google and Facebook are approaching search in fundamentally different ways. For Google it's based on algorithms and crowdsourcing. Facebook's vision is to give search results based on your friends and their recommendations. Is Google's way really better?

CERF: Well, I don't think that I can make a conclusion yet about better or - or not. I think it depends on how this all evolves. And one of the things that you learn when you're dealing with social networking activity is that you're going to get some surprises. You're going to find people taking advantage of the various mechanisms that you've incorporated in ways that you might not have anticipated. Of course we all hope that will turn out to be a very flexible tool that will produce the kinds of collaboration that we're looking forward to. But as I say, this is very early days for - for Google Plus.

CHANG: Early days. Let's bring in Cory Johnson now, our editor-at- large. I know he wanted to talk to you about being the chairman of ICANN as well.

CORY JOHNSON, BLOOMBERG NEWS ANCHOR: Yeah. Vint, let me ask you about ICANN. I've never really understood ICANN. I know what it is. It's basically the group that assigns internet addresses and determines how the internet will be setup from a technological standpoint. But I don't really understand why that's a continuing effort and why it's important. If anyone should know, it would be you.

CERF: Well, first of all let me explain that ICANN has a very narrow but very important role. It's responsible for managing the domain name system - the top-level domains that are part of the internet. They don't actually operate any of that apparatus, with one exception. They do operate one of the root zone systems, of which there are 13. But apart from that it's policy and it's decisions about what things can be in the top level. They're also concerned about security and safety in the net and in the - in the space in which they operate.

By the way, they also are responsible for allocating internet address space. I hope that you reported back in February that the ICANN allocation of the IP version 4 address space was fully exhausted, I think February 4. And that these allocations of the version 4 address space go to the regional internet registries, of which there are five. And some of those, APNIC, the one in Asia Pacific, has also completely exhausted its supply received from ICANN of version 4 address space.

So on June 8 there was global test of the IP version 6 addressing system. That has 128 bits of address. That adds up to 340 trillion, trillion, trillion addresses, which ought to be enough to last until after I'm dead. Then it's somebody else's problem. But the point I want to make here is that ICANN plays a very critical role in the allocation of and management of certain resources in the internet. It does not do all of it. For example, it doesn't run any of the networks. It simply allocates address space that's needed for anyone to interact on the net.

So they have this very important role, and the policy development role that they have is - is done in a multi-stakeholder way, which is probably the most important aspect of this operation. And that is that many points of view come together in order to establish policy.

JOHNSON: So Vint, let me - let me jump in there. If you're a businessperson who cares about technology, why do you care about these issues?

CERF: Hang on. I'm not - I'm not getting any audio.

JOHNSON: Yeah. Let me try that again. If you're a businessperson who cares about technology, why do you care about these issues about ICANN?

CERF: I'm sorry. I caught only half of your sentence because I was missing some of the audio. Would you ask you it again?

JOHNSON: Yeah, sure. Let me try it one more time. So you're a businessperson. You're watching this show. Maybe you don't understand the ins and outs (ph) of technology, but you care about technology. Why do you care about these programs at ICANN?

CERF: Well, the reason I care so much about this is that without having the basic technology in place the internet doesn't work. You have to have internet address space in order to be part of the internet. In order to be part of the World Wide Web, you need domain names because they're a part of the URLs that you type in or that you click on in order to get to various web pages. These are absolutely fundamental to the way the internet works. And so you have to care about that. If you don't, well, the network doesn't work.

CHANG: Vint, since you are such a visionary, how is technology going to be used one way in the future that we would never expect?

CERF: Well, I'm - I think you have a very broad audience. Some of them probably will expect a variety of things. But there is a trend now towards what we call the internet of things. That is to say, devices that we have around the house or in the office or in the home that we carry around with us that will be internet enabled. There are picture frames today that are internet enabled, for example. There are refrigerators. There are printers. There are projection units.

And in fact, I just recently discovered something that I used to joke about. An internet-enabled light bulb. It's an LED light bulb. It costs about $15. But given that it costs that much, it also lasts about 15 years and it has a little radio in it that does IP version 6 address and can be part of the internet. So you can turn this thing on remotely or turn it off or ask what state it's in. We are going to see a large number of devices on the internet, probably more devices than there are people. And of course everyone understands there's a major trend now in the - in fusion of mobiles into the internet. And they too of course will need address space.

CHANG: Wired magazine recently had a very controversial cover, saying the web is dead given the rise appification. Do you agree with that?

CERF: No, I don't think the web is dead at all. In fact, what the usual thing that happens is someone will invent a new application and someone will say, "Everything else is dead." It's sort of like saying television will kill movies, which it didn't do, or DVDs would kill the movies or television, which it didn't do. Even the internet isn't going to kill any of those things. It facilitates yet another avenue for application development. So I don't see this as - as a web killer at all. The web is going to be a major part of our future, as will some of these new things.

CHANG: All right. Vint Cerf, I would love to pick your brain for hours but we'll have to leave it there. Google's chief internet evangelist. Thank you so much for joining us from Mountain View.

18:21

***END OF TRANSCRIPT***

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