Question: How would you describe man in the Internet era?
Dr. Cerf: So you can actually see some of the side effects. What happens when you get a billion people all connected together and able to interact? The first thing you notice is thanks to Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web is an enormous avalanche of information coming into the network. The uses and consumers of information have now become the producers.
And so when you look at things like Wikipedia you discover that its content comes from anywhere in the world from anyone who has a piece of information that may be of use to others. What amazed me is the number of people who want to share their information and they are not looking for payment, they are simply looking for credit or they simply want to contribute.
So there's just this enormous quantity of information, now there's a side effect: the side effect is that a lot of information is of very little value or that it's misinformation because the person that put it up on the net is misinformed. So now there’s a problem of figuring out which information on the network should we pay attention to and what should we ignore. This is not a new problem.
This problem comes up in all media: there is information and misinformation available from television, radio, newspapers, magazines, your friends and family and your parents.
So you have that problem in all media and the probably the most important thing that you can teach children is to how to think critically about the information that they are getting, to try to evaluate whether or not it's useful or not.
We figured out kinds of clichés to help us do this in other media for example logos on all the brands from television programs, television channels, newspapers and magazines help us figure out which means we should see, which magazines we should read, which newspapers, we should pay attention to.
Of course many of you are part of the news media and I would be willing to bet that every article that you read that you didn't write, every article that you read that you actually know something about you notice that it has some little mistakes in it.
And yet we don't always remember that, we notice that if we know something about that particular story but if we don't know something we sort of it that everything is correct we all know that isn't quite true.
So one of these things at this global network can do is help us tease out what the real truth is because there are so many disparate points of view available to us.
Blogging is an example of this, both video and text blogging. The Wikipedia is another example. Then we start see collaborative activities happening. Google is really interested in that, we put our products on the network that will help people work together in the production of a text and in the production spreadsheets and the production of other collaborative works and when you look at world war craft or second life or some of the other role-playing games you are seeing very interesting social collaborative activities going on in fact there is so the interesting that there are economists that are studying what's going on in World Of War Craft and in second life to try to understand the social and economic experiments that have been carried out by the people who are playing in those environments.
So I believe that as time goes on, we have 1 billion users at now, I'm predicting 3 billion users by 2010 (half the world's population roughly speaking). A very large fraction of those users will be getting access by mobiles like this Blackberry.
That has shaped the way in which many companies have been producing content on the network why they are adapting that content to be reasonably accessible through the small displays. Keyboards are accessible to people who are three inches tall and sometimes limited bandwidth.
So a very large fraction of the world's population may be introduced to the Internet through these devices and eventually through broadband access. I should remind you that Australia has a very, very high penetration of Internet use something on the order of 70% of population has access. A smaller fraction has access with broadband and I anticipate several evolutions there: one of them is that more people will have broadband access but a lot of that for consumers is asymmetric, which means you can pull in it faster than you can push it out it's easy to predict that people are going to demand symmetric access to the network at the time for the same reason that businesses already get symmetric access to the network.
So the net all of this is that we are going to see an increasing number of applications in which the users are producing information as well as consuming it.