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April 12, 2020 06:34 pm

Vint Cerf Explains Why the Internet is Holding Up

In a video interview over Google Hangouts this week, 76-year-old Vint Cerf explained to the Washington Post why the internet's 50-year-old architecture is still holding up, "with a mix of triumph and wonder in his voice.""Resiliency and redundancy are very much a part of the Internet design," explained Cerf, whose passion for touting the wonders of computer networking prompted Google in 2005 to name him its "Chief Internet Evangelist," a title he still holds... Cerf, along with fellow computer scientist Robert E. Kahn, was a driving force in developing key Internet protocols in the 1970s for the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which provided early research funding but ultimately relinquished control of the network it spawned. Cerf also was among a gang of self-described "Netheads" who led an insurgency against the dominant forces in telecommunications at the time, dubbed the "Bellheads" for their loyalty to the Bell Telephone Company and its legacy technologies. Bell, which dominated U.S. telephone service until it was broken up in the 1980s, and similar monopolies in other countries wanted to connect computers through a system much like their lucrative telephone systems, with fixed networks of connections run by central entities that could make all of the major technological decisions, control access and charge whatever the market -- or government regulators -- would allow. The vision of the Netheads was comparatively anarchic, relying on technological insights and a lot of faith in collaboration. The result was a network -- or really, a network of networks -- with no chief executive, no police, no taxman and no laws. In their place were technical protocols, arrived at through a process for developing expert consensus, that offered anyone access to the digital world from any properly configured device. Their numbers, once measured in the dozens, now rank in the tens of billions, including phones, televisions, cars, dams, drones, satellites, thermometers, garbage cans, refrigerators, watches and so much more... Such a system carries a notable cost in terms of security and privacy, a fact the world rediscovers every time there's a major data breach, ransomware attack or controversy over the amount of information governments and private companies collect about anyone who's online -- a category that includes more than half of the world's almost 8 billion people. But the lack of a central authority is key to why the Internet works as well as it does, especially at times of unforeseen demands. Some of the early Internet architects -- Cerf among them, from his position at the Pentagon -- were determined to design a system that could continue operating through almost anything, including a nuclear attack from the Soviets... Several [Netheads] acknowledged they celebrated just a bit when the telephone companies gradually abandoned old-fashioned circuit-switching for what was called "Voice Over IP" or VoIP. It was essentially transmitting voice calls over the Internet -- using the same technical protocols that Cerf and others had developed decades earlier. "They're deservedly taking a bit of a moment for a high five right now," added one Comcast vice president (who "has briefed some members of the Internet's founding generation about how the company has been handling increased demands.") And last week Vint Cerf reported good news about his own recent COVID-19 infection -- that he is no longer contagious -- and briefly summed up the experience for the Washington Post. "I don't recommend it... It's very debilitating."

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