Vinton Cerf Quotations

We will have more Internet, larger numbers of users, more mobile access, more speed, more things online and more appliances we can control over the Internet.

Instant messaging and chat rooms have basically created a level playing field for deaf people.

At some point, you can't lift this boulder with just your own strength. And if you find that you need to move bigger and bigger boulders up hills, you will need more and more help.

Information flow is what the Internet is about. Information sharing is power. If you don't share your ideas, smart people can't do anything about them, and you'll remain anonymous and powerless.

We never, ever in the history of mankind have had access to so much information so quickly and so easily.

Although I've had several major career changes, I was extremely hesitant about making some of them.

I expect to see a lot of household appliances on the Net by 2010, as well as autos and other mobile devices.

I was very nervous about going up to teach at Stanford and very nervous even about going to ARPA.

Today we have 1 billion users on the Net. By 2010 we will have maybe 2 billion.

In the larger companies, you have this tendency to get top-down direction.

So, for me, working with larger companies has often been very satisfying, precisely because of the ability of bringing critical mass to bear on a given effort.

Movie distribution may very well have migrated fully to digital form by then, making a huge dent in the need to print film and physically distribute content.

What is special about VOIP is that it's just another thing you can do on the Internet, whereas it is the only thing - or nearly the only thing with the exception of the dial-up modem and fax - that you can do on the public switched telephone network.

The Internet lives where anyone can access it.

Their Internet usage is growing very rapidly, and even they can do the math: If everyone in China needed an IPv4 address - just one - this country would use up one third of the entire public IP address space.

There is an underlying, fundamental reliance on the Internet, which continues to grow in the number of users, country penetration and both fixed and wireless broadband access.

But what we all have to learn is that we can't do everything ourselves.

In a small company, you often see a lot more of what goes on in a broader range of things. And that's good.

There's an old maxim that says, 'Things that work persist,' which is why there's still Cobol floating around.

The computer would do anything you programmed it to do.

There has been a substitution of ideology for fact and scientific and engineering data in this administration.

There's a tremendous amount of energy in Japan and, increasingly, in China.

We had no idea that this would turn into a global and public infrastructure.

My reaction to a lot of the current situation that we're in is based in part on a serious concern that the present administration's course ignores reality.

First of all, in terms of investment in Internet-related developments, venture capitalists - once burned - are now very cautious and are investing in areas that actually make business sense.

I'm projecting somewhere between 100 million and 200 million computers on the Net by the end of December 2000, and about 300 million users by that same time.

The purpose behind terrorism is to instill fear in people - the fear that electrical power, for instance, will be taken away or the transportation system will be taken down.

Written communication is a tremendous help for me, and so when electronic mail was invented in '71, I got very excited about it, thinking well, gee, the deaf community could really use this, or the hard of hearing community as well.

when we do get to the point where we need all the services in space that we have become accustomed to on Earth.

Of course, I've done small company things, too, but most of them have been nonprofit organizations, such as the Internet Society, and I'm on the board of a number of small companies.

Cerf is a wicked smart guy who knows the ins and outs of the internet and internet policies better than anyone,

I expect that the entertainment industry will have gone through its own convulsion in the same way the telecom industry will have gone through its.

If it didn't work, then we couldn't have built the Internet.

People need to be exposed to what the various problems are in various parts of the business. And you can become isolated from that in a large company.

I'm still a strong proponent of getting IPv6 rolled out,

I would agree that the U.S. educational system, especially at the undergraduate and graduate levels, needs some work, but in the meantime, we seem to be cranking out people who are capable,

My big concern is that suddenly access providers want to step in the middle and create a toll road to limit customers' ability to get access to the services of their choice even though they have paid for access to the network in the first place.

Users will also begin using their mobile devices to control and manage other Internet-enabled appliances (kitchen equipment, entertainment equipments, etc.),

There are a plethora of domain name servers which are below our level of visibility, and we have nothing to say about how those machines are operated.

don't know you can't do that, so they go of and do it.

The time is now to think beyond the Earth. Lest you think this is all fantasy, let me assure you that it is quite real.

I started thinking about the past 25 years as the Internet evolved, and I thought, 'Gee, what should we be doing now so that in another 25 years, we are ready for whatever's coming?'

The structure of the W3C didn't lend itself to quite the degree of freedom to contribute that the IETF does. We found it difficult to get points across and to influence what was happening.

So one of the most important things we can do in the industry is make sure that the threat of cyberattacks is minimized as much as possible.

Putting in capacity (in a business) that's exponentially growing means putting more capacity than expected so you don't get overrun by demand. You have to stay ahead of it.

Of course, you do have to get accustomed to being satisfied a little bit at second-hand by people who actually do some of the key work.

Al Gore actually deserves a lot of credit. In about 1986, he started asking questions like, 'Why don't we take these supercomputers and these optical fiber networks and put them together. Would that do anything?' Well, guess what? That eventually turned into the National Science Foundation Network, which became a core element of the Internet.

This is a place that's just full of creative energy, and I like places like that,

This is not a new interest for me, ... It's just that I've spent the last decade or so working more on basic Internet infrastructure evolution at MCI. But I've been increasingly interested in focusing back on the application level, higher layer stuff. So this is a wonderful opportunity to pursue that.

This medium will enjoy wider-spread use than television, radio or phones, and will ultimately expand beyond planet Earth,

Allowing broadband carriers to control what people see and do online would fundamentally undermine the principles that have made the Internet such a success.

It's Chief Internet Evangelist, which suggests I should go from three-piece suits to some sort of ecclesiastical robes.

It's conceivable that the IPN could go like its terrestrial counterpart, starting out as a network supporting scientific research and eventually evolving into something of commercial interest,

It took 30 years to get the Internet to where we are now. Thirty years from now, we have to assume there will be colonies on the moon, colonies on Mars and other planets and research stations all over.

These people just don't know you can't do that. So they just go out and do it. That's the great thing of working with all these new folks.

If you need to understand it to make policy, you should turn first to people who are scientists and engineers for factual information.

Because when these DDOS attacks swamp access lines, then filtering at the other end doesn't help.

Geographically indexed databases are going to be extremely valuable over time for people who are in mobile operations.

I can imagine people actually working in virtual environments where productive, cooperative work is undertaken, and I think we will find people helping others to take advantage of masses of information that are inaccessible or too vast to process in real time today.

I believe that the problem of global climate change will ultimately spur our global society to respond and while the condition does not appear to be reversible, we will find ways to adapt to it.

I am an optimist by nature and believe strongly that technology can be brought to bear to create alternatives, even in crisis situations.

At Google, we see and feel the dangers of the government-led Net crackdown,

Engineers are really good at labeling and branding things. If we had named Kentucky Fried Chicken, it would have been Hot Dead Birds.

Privacy may actually be an anomaly,

Power corrupts, and PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.

In a town of 3,000 people there is no privacy. Everybody knows what everybody is doing.

Humor is the only thing that allows you to survive every pressure and crisis.

The remarkable social impact and economic success of the Internet is in many ways directly attributable to the architectural characteristics that were part of its design. The Internet was designed with no gatekeepers over new content or services.

What's wonderful about Google is that as long as you bring ideas to the table, it doesn't matter what else is going on.

Now, more than ever, the Internet must be wielded along with other media to cast bright lights on all who would destroy freedom in the world.

By placing intelligence at the edges rather than control in the middle of the network, the Internet has created a platform for innovation.

If we do not like what we see in that mirror the problem is not to fix the mirror, we have to fix society.

There was something amazingly enticing about programming.

The hackers don't want to destroy the network. They want to keep it running, so they can keep making money from it.

It is just a thing. Whether it is good or bad depends what you do with it. If you don't like what you are doing with it then it is simply a reflection of what you are as an individual, an organisation or a society and that is what you have to fix.

Google’s objective is to organize the world’s information and to make it accessible. Unicode plays a central role in this effort because it is the principal means by which content in every language can be represented in a form that can be processed by software. As Unicode extends its coverage of the world’s languages, it helps Google accomplish its mission.

The last decade of Internet evolution has been marked by innovation. That innovation has been a consequence of the open and neutral access that the Internet has afforded up until now.

If you are deaf, you need captions for spoken elements. If you are blind, you need voiced descriptions of Web contents and spoken renderings of e-mail. The range of physical disabilities is very large, and we need many different tools to overcome the consequential barriers to Internet use. Let us commit ourselves to truly assuring that the Internet really is for everyone.

In the Internet world, both ends essentially pay for access to the Internet system, and so the providers of access get compensated by the users at each end. My big concern is that suddenly access providers want to step in the middle and create a toll road to limit customers' ability to get access to services of their choice even though they have paid for access to the network in the first place.

I've been hearing-impaired, not quite since birth, but I've been wearing hearing aids since I was 13, so I'm very conscious of the difficulty of voice communication.

The closer you look at something, the more complex it seems to be.

My belief is that there will be very large numbers of Internet-enabled devices on the Net - home appliances, office equipment, things in the car and maybe things that you carry around. And since they're all on the Internet and Internet-enabled, they'll be manageable through the network, and so we'll see people using the Net and applications on the Net to manage their entertainment systems, manage their, you know, office activities and maybe even much of their social lives using systems on the Net that are helping them perform that function.

Those are all computational engines that are highly distributed and therefore highly robust, .. We're seeing a very significant evolution in the way we even think about computer systems, let alone specific applications.

I no longer give Power Point presentations, because I've come to believe that power corrupts, and Power Point corrupts absolutely.

There are things that have excited me to no end, and it's the sharing of knowledge that has come about on the network, and I see at an increasing pace this ability to share what we know.

We live in a very complex world.

On email and the first instance of spam: This is not for advertising! This is for serious work!

People's motivations haven't changed in maybe 400 or maybe 4,000 years.

I think imaginative exercises can have a profound impact on the future - what you can imagine can sometimes turn into something you can figure out how to build.

They say a year in the Internet business is like a dog year.. equivalent to seven years in a regular person's life. In other words, it's evolving fast and faster.

I'm disappointed in people in general.

The Internet reflects the societies in which we live, and so the content on the Net and some of the abuses that you see on the Net are reflections of that.

I'd like to know what the Internet is going to look like in 2050. Thinking about it makes me wish I were eight years old.

Surf the Web is a happy coincidence.

Science fiction does not remain fiction for long. And certainly not on the Internet.