Vint Cerf visits iHub Nairobi

Dr. Vinton (Vint) Cerf, co-designer of TCP/IP and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, was in Kenya last week attending the 6th annual Internet Governance Forum in Nairobi. Vint visited the iHub for a forum dubbed Synergistic Communities and spoke at the 'Fire Side' Chat.

It was inspiring to listen to Vint, one of the 'fathers' of the Internet, passionately recount the development of the TCP/IP protocol which is the underlying architecture of the Internet.

Vint also spoke about present day challenges and opportunities and future projects during the sessions. My highlights are;

• Vint believes the three most significant innovations associated to the Internet are; email, world wide web (WWW), and the smartphone.
• He spoke of the Google co-funded other 3 billion project (O3b) which is developing a next-generation network using satellites in orbit 8.063 kilometers from the earth that can deliver Internet at the speed of fibre optic links.
• He explained that copyright laws were established 250 years ago in the days of physical goods. The change to allow the patenting of software has resulted in an undesirable scenario illustrated by the 'defensive' purchase of Microsoft (awesome error by Vint) Motorola Mobility by Google to enable them gain to control of thousands of patents owned by Motorola Mobility. Vint cited Creative Commons as a great innovation to open content on the Internet.
• Privacy - Google scans your emails to offer advertisements which generate revenue but believes the content in Google storage belongs to the owners of the respective accounts.
• TCP/IP was developed as solution to a problem; to connect a number of different packet switching networks designed by different vendors into a network of networks (the "Internet"). The ARPANET project was funded by the US Department of Defense.
• Vint said it was his fault that the internet protocol (IP) addresses were defined as 32-bit numbers because he did not envision there would ever be a need for more than 4,294,967,296 unique addresses. These have been exhausted. His desire is that the whole world switches to Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) on 1 January 2013 exactly 30 years after the launch of IPv4. He congratulated Kenya for being ready for the transition IPv6.
• His humility in accepting there were other developments happening at the time that enable Vint and his colleagues to anticipate of the social impact of the Internet. He spoke about the existence of networks in existence but they were proprietary eg. Xerox had a local area network for the 'personal computers' in the early 70's.
• How the email @ sign was selected in the address, manual lookups and the development of domain name system. 
• His love for science fiction and his look alike in The Matrix; The Architect 
• His Facebook page which he abandoned because he opted to accept anyone who wanted to be his friend and got annoyed by the limit on how many friends he could have. He spoke about how he has gone about creating his Google+ Circles more thoughtfully. 
• His intense passion about the new project he is working on; Interplanetary Network. It is a NASA project which seeks to extend the Internet into outer space for planet-to-planet communications.