VINT CERF CREATED THE INTERNET. NOW HE WANTS TO SOLVE THE MYSTERY OF DISAPPEARING SOCKS
BY IAIN S BRUCE

IT was only when he reached the middle of nowhere that Vint Cerf realised what he had done. This is somewhat ironic, given the pan-global nature of his career to date, but it was in a one-horse town at least 100 miles from anywhere you ever heard of that he began to fully appreciate the implications of the whirlwind he had unleashed. Driving through the desolate stretches of the mid-American wilderness on his way to a houseboat holiday, the full-time inventor of the internet and part-time gourmet suddenly remembered that if he was to cook the perfect paella that evening, he was going to need to score some saffron.

With his wife Sigrid at the wheel, he accessed the web on his mobile phone, located the details of the nearest settlement and phoned its only shop asking for the spice department. A voice that clearly belonged to the store's sole proprietor, webmaster and bottle-washer-in-chief, confirmed that by some stroke of good fortune, Cerf had come straight through to that very department. Within 30 minutes, the pioneering scientist was back on track, rolling through the tumbleweed with a packet of saffron in his glove compartment.

"It was about then," grins the founding father of the digital age, "that I realised this internet thing really was going to work out."

It is almost impossible to over-state the significance of Dr Vinton Gray Cerf's lifework. Together with fellow researcher Bob Kahn, he developed the technical system that makes the information superhighway possible and engineered the world's first commercial email system. Winner of the 1994 Turing Award, he has been the recipient of over 30 international honours ranging from the US National Medal of Technology to Bulgaria's Grand Cross of the Order of St Cyril and St Methodius.

As the accredited inventor of the internet, he has changed the way that millions of us work, learn and interact, creating the fundamental infrastructure on which 21st century society will be conducted.

The scope of his concerns is no less breathtaking. During the time we spend together in an Edinburgh pub, Cerf voices concerns about everything from the impact the dust storms on Mars might have on Nasa's exploratory Rover robot - which he intends to use as a relay station for his pan-galactic internet experiments - to the problem of ensuring that the data currently online is still available 200 years from now. He wonders how to get the portable internet café he has designed for developing countries to fit into one box instead of three and even, whimsically, how technology might be used to solve the mystery of the world's disappearing socks.

"Conceptually it would work," he says of this last idea. "If you sewed a radio identification tag into each one, your computer could locate black sock 0056L in its hiding place under the living room sofa." Briefly, he admits that it might be simpler to avoid mismatches by only buying identical pairs, before musing that, theoretically, the tagging device could work with anything - including teaspoons, "though they may not be dishwasher-proof".

Since the mid-1960s, Cerf has been kept awake at night by such questions. Born with a hearing impairment in New Haven, Connecticut in 1943, he moved with his family to Southern California, where he was raised as a Congregationalist (his current religion, he says, is "geek orthodox"). An interest in the rising field of computing led him to enrol as an undergraduate student at Stanford University, and since he graduated in 1965 his career path has been characterised by equal measures of inspiration and invention.

In 1973, fresh from working on Arpanet - the military-sponsored first attempt to make computers talk to each other - Cerf teamed up with Kahn to work out whether it would be possible to get several of these new computer networks to converse from a distance. They succeeded, creating what was then called an "internetwork", and the scientific paper they co-presented a year later is now accepted as the document which gave birth to the web.

It is perhaps appropriate that today Cerf works at Google, the multinational corporation with which the internet is so closely associated. As vice-president and chief evangelist, a large part of his job now involves travelling around the world raising awareness about the internet and debating its implications.

With a CV like that you would expect Cerf to be a heavyweight sort of guy; perhaps even a dull one. Yet despite the impeccable tailoring, perfect tie and matching handkerchief, the man himself is extremely personable. Looking like a cross between Arthur Ransome and one of the Romanovs, the 21st century's leading scientific light maintains a twinkle in his eye that belies his legendary status. Though he claims that a lunchtime bottle of wine has rendered him virtually insensible, the 64-year-old remains astute, deep-thinking and razor-sharp throughout our interview. I wouldn't like to be playing him at poker.

Despite holding 13 honorary doctorates, Cerf appears more interested in other people's ideas than his own. When we first meet, he asks a series of questions, then responds to my theory that internet life is eroding the traditional macro-economic boundaries. "I think role-playing games like Second Life are already doing something like that," he suggests. "People are discovering each other through these virtual environments, meeting people they would never otherwise have encountered and forming relationships across traditional political and geographic boundaries.

"In the US, we have a very embarrassing phenomenon in that Americans are not very perceptive about geography and international politics. The consequence of that is they view other places in the world as uniform, but now we are being drawn to see nuances and colours in the palette that weren't there before. And the possibility that we might view each other differently than governments might want us to view each other is very appealing, particularly if it's young people who discover that they're the same. As those children grow up and assume positions of responsibility, when it comes to international contact they'll realise that people are just people, and not the red menace they've been told about.

"God," he adds, "wouldn't it be wonderful if we could rely on that?"

Cerf pauses, clearly dissatisfied with the idea of leaving things to chance. "What if we took your idea and tried to make it happen?" he says suddenly. "We started out speculating whether this effect could happen, but why don't we turn that around, kick it about and make that a big target? The Internet Governance Forum meets in Rio in mid-November. Some countries are going to be in there fighting over critical infrastructure and so on, but I'm going to fight hard to get them to focus on something else, like bringing people together."

Once during the mid-1970s, while Cerf was experimenting on the first wireless internet system as part of a government-sponsored project, the specially-adapted van he was working in drew the attention of the San Francisco police. Approaching the parked truck, an officer rapped on the back door and was told that they were there working for the government. Peering into an interior crammed with high-tech gizmos, flashing lights and assorted geek life, the officer sucked his teeth, raised an eyebrow and asked the only question he could think of: "Which government?"

The truth, of course, is that Cerf doesn't work for anything as local as a nation state. The original Arpanet project that he worked on as a graduate student might have been designed for military purposes, but Cerf's 35-year career has always been much broader in scope and ambition.

"The internet was designed with no gatekeepers over new content or services," he says. "Some people say knowledge is power, that information is power. What they're implying is that withholding it is power, that they know something you don't know, and therefore have the advantage, whereas the underlying concept of the internet is that information-sharing is power. The scientific community is the most visible example of this, with people using the net to analyse data, share the work they are doing, and accelerate the pace at which we can digest and understand extremely complex concepts."

There are downsides. The fraudulent use of web auction sites, music piracy, cyber-harassment and the misuse of online community sites have sparked calls for greater regulation of the medium. Incidents such as the recent promotion of violence by teenage gangs on YouTube have only served to underline this, and perhaps surprisingly, Cerf agrees that international legislation is required.

"You can't rely solely on national laws, because the perpetrators could be anywhere," he explains, "so if there is consensus that certain things are unacceptable, then the only way to deal with them is to have global, treaty-like agreements in place, and I certainly think this is achievable. We have similar protocols governing other common infrastructure, like the law of the sea, and because conflicting interests were at stake it was a 20-year struggle, but we got there eventually."

Cerf seems to derive his strong sense of social responsibility from his family life with sons, David and Bennett, his predeliction for community work, and even his passion for science fiction. He has worked on a raft of voluntary projects exploring services for the deaf and served as a technical advisor to production for Star Trek producer Gene Roddenberry's Earth: Final Conflict, making a guest appearance on the programme in May 1998.

"We have to learn how to rely on each other," he says. "Certainly these negotiations will slow down when country X is pissed off at country Y, but we could do it, and regulation is not always a negative thing. On the positive side we could use such a framework to make a lot of good stuff happen, and it would make sense to co-operate in areas where no individual administration can hope to be effective on its own." It might, he speculates, even help us to "avoid killing each other, talk things through and avoid wars".

When the internet was first created in a university lab, few would have foreseen that it was the beginning of the 21st century's most important scientific and communications resource. But Cerf, sitting comfortably in an Edinburgh hostelry, at a point in time when a billion new web pages go online every day, points out that the internet's genesis was actually a fairly lengthy process. He admits, though, that it has been "particularly delicious to witness it in the course of one lifetime, of one career. Other infrastructures have taken a lot longer to build and a measure of the pace is that current internet speeds are precisely a million times faster than they were when we began experimenting with Arpanet back in the 1970s."

And, he adds, his invention has a long way to go. With only 16% of the world's population enjoying direct access to a connection, Cerf seems unwilling to rest on his laurels until the web is at the fingertips of every man, woman and child on the planet.

This is the mission driving his internet café in a box project. Designed to be unpacked and providing solar-powered, satellite-backed internet access within a matter of hours, it forms part of an experimental effort to connect the developing world with the advantages of the modern West. Cerf, who seems blessed with infinite mental energy, is currently lobbying friends in the World Bank to supply funds to support the scheme's expansion.

His enthusiasm is impossible to dent. Naysayers grumble that non-stop consumerism, perpetual junk mail and the seemingly unending flood of pornography that inhabits cyberspace are hardly evidence of a force for good. Cyber-luddites, meanwhile, dispute that 24-hour accessibility has improved our lives. But none of this deflects the man who started it all.

For Cerf, the online revolution delivers vast potential to anybody with the gumption to take advantage of it. Bringing the debate closer to home, he argues that the web has presented geographically peripheral countries like Scotland with the chance to compete on an even playing field that would have seemed impossible 20 years ago.

"You have opportunities now that you just didn't have before," he insists. "For years, I've watched countries with relatively small populations attack opportunities in the information technology sector, extending their domestic markets to a global one, and I think the way it enables small countries' ability to moneterise their expertise is tremendously exciting."

His sole disappointment is in the way the education sector has embraced IT. He sees teaching children about computers via standalone ICT classes as an approach that completely misses the point, favouring instead the handful of experimental school syllabuses in which pupils use computing in every class from art to English, and their parents check their homework via the web.

Asked about the aforementioned YouTube controversy over teenage gangs, he contends that there was never a better time to remember the old adage about not shooting messengers when they turn up bearing bad news.

"The internet is a mirror," says its inventor. "If you don't like what you see in the mirror, don't try and smash it. It's the reflection that you don't like.

"And that," he grins, "is what you should be concentrating on."

Right now, Cerf is living out of a suitcase as he flies around the world evangelising the merits of the medium he built with his own two hands. He bounces between Google's California headquarters and the Virginia home where he and Sigrid raised their two grown-up sons with more energy than a man of half his years. A question about retirement flits across my mind, but is rejected outright on the grounds that imaginations like this cannot be retired: such is the sheer volume of ideas they generate that if you tried to stop them, they would eventually explode.

"There is a lot still to do. We're building an infrastructure for the 21st century over which everything will be run, and it's vital that we get it right now; that we don't let it be taken over by the dark side of the force," he jokes with just a hint of steel.

"All I'm interested in is getting things done. I don't care about technical details, protocol or policy. I just want to make things happen."