Question: Have you ever sit back and reflect on the usage of the Internet worldwide and are you entirely happy with the way it's evolving the content and use.
Dr. Cerf - Well obviously I have watched this thing evolved for the past 35 plus years. I have two reactions, first of all I believe that the spheres especially after team Tim Berners-Lee introduced the World Wide Web and became commercialized by Netscape communications and then Microsoft and so on.
I believe that has triggered an enormous amount of information to flow on the net and I see that it is generally useful.
If you like me when you have a question that you don’t have an answer to any Google it and it's amazing how often you actually get something useful out of that process, so on that score I'm really very happy.
Doctors tell me the patient is a very well-informed. Students are more able to find information of course some of them try to cheat by getting in a paper it is already written; the tools are available for teachers to recognize when the students have been plagiarizing the material the seeds of the solution of that problem are hiding in the technology.
I'm not happy that there is bad content on the network I'm not happy with spam I'm not happy about viruses and worms. I accept that some of this behaviours (bottnets for example) are driven by economics, driven by people who believe they can generate revenue from these kinds of abuses.
I don’t think that we can defend against the mentality by using only technical means although there are very specific things we should do in order to minimize at least some of the abusive behaviours for example if we were overusing IPV 6 and one of the features of the six is that you can always go into fully encrypted moulds between sources and computers on the network.
That would actually blunt the number of attacks that can be made against either of the two communicating computers because you can't see deeply into the packet it's been encrypted at the IP layer.
We could be checking the sources from another address the packets going into the system and rejecting those that are certain addresses that are patently faults sometimes spoofing of the source IP addresses used as a tool for launching certain kinds of attacks.
We could do a better job of detecting viruses and worms, we could certainly do a better job of building operating systems that are less vulnerable to be invaded and turned into zombies that are part of the .net armies.
The domain name system itself could be reinforced using what's called DNC which is where the digitally signing the domain name information that's been announced now Sweden is digitally signing its root sign files to DNC the top level domain name to Sweden.
The Internet Corporation assigned names and numbers which is ICANN is rapidly moving toward supplementation of DNS sector the rate and encouraging all of the top level providers to digitally sign things.
So there's a whole of things that we could and should be doing to deal with some of the abusive behaviours on the net but not all of that could be defended against technically some of it requires us to do some of things that we have done in other domains where we see socially unacceptable activities but we tell people if we catch you doing that there will be consequences but we have to do that on a global scale because the Internet is global and is frankly insensitive to national boundaries from the most part.
Settle in a cooperative work among governments in order to enforce various kinds of response to inappropriate and antisocial behaviour on the network.