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Internet Pioneer Urges Unfettered Net

Vinton Cerf is now crafting an interplanetary Internet.

By Niala Boodhoo, PCWorld   

"I ask 'Internuts' everywhere to join us," said Cerf, who called the Internet a "kind of disorganized Boswell of the human spirit." He spoke at the ninth annual Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference here this week.

Parents and teachers, rather than the government, should take responsibility for protecting children from some areas of the Web, Cerf said. He is president of the Internet Society, a nonprofit group of Web-related businesses, programmers, and other Internet-related workers. The organization is also an umbrella group for Internet infrastructure agencies such as the Internet Engineering Task Force and the Internet Architecture Board.

Cerf earned the title "father of the Internet" after developing TCP/IP with Robert Kahn while working for the U.S. government in the mid-1970s. He is working on a project to create an interplanetary Internet. A well-functioning network between Mars and Earth should be up by 2008, he said.

At the end of his address, a reporter jokingly asked if Cerf had invented Vice President Al Gore--a reference to the vice president's widely mocked assertion that he had helped invent the Internet. Cerf laughingly replied: "I don't think his parents would appreciate that. Besides, I never talk about my illegitimate children anyway."