Question: The Internet is a means of democratization but it's also a means of standardization. What are your reflections on this?
Dr. Cerf - The answer is yes. Some people think that standardizing means a suppression of creativity. I consider this to be completely invalid reasoning. Standardization creates opportunity for innovation. So by way of example by standardizing the Internet protocols in saying that I'm out of where you are in the Internet when you plug in your compatible with 400 million other machines on the system if you want to invent a new application the standard permits anyone who is part of the net to absorb the new technology that you've offered that's why the peer-to-peer applications and the skype applications have propagated so quickly: it's called the end to end principle.
It says that the network doesn't know what applications it is supporting it says that you invent the applications at the edges of the net; so I see standardization as a powerful, powerful tool to create interoperability in and out the net and therefore an opportunity to create and to innovate.
With regard to democratization I feel strongly that the Internet is one of the most democratizing technologies ever invented. It has all the good and bad characteristics of democratization and all of you will remember from a famous close game that “democracy is a messy terrible system but it is better than anything else it has never been invented”.
Once the Internet became publicly available which wasn't until 1989 actually you got all of the side effects of the general public using of the technology, all the good stuff and all the bad stuff.
I consider the Internet to be a kind of mirror of the society. You look in America see all the good things and bad things about people of course some people say you should fix the mirror and my reaction is it doesn't help to fix the mirror you gotta fix the people if you're concerned about the way they're behaving.\\\\\\\\
I see the democratization as being a very, very powerful force and it's an interesting one because it's an erosive kind of force that may take time. So visually I think of the Grand Canyon in the United States that started out as a floodplain and a river was running through it and at some point it carved it and after several hundred million years it has become this enormous canyon.
I look at countries like China that exhibit concern about freely available information looking for ways to inhibit some of that information exchange. Over time that will erode.
I believe that society will adapt and eventually recognize the utility of the broad sharing of information that they've been in a very restricted environment for many decades and it takes time.
So I'm very patient about the technologies and their abilities to open up all would otherwise be as limited environments. Patience and persistence are two great values and I can tell you that Graham Clark was patient and persistent in the development of the cochlear implant and as I read his story the dates paralleled important milestones in the Internet and I remember thinking I wish we'd known each other we would have commiserated with each other about the incredible barriers we got in the way of producing the technologies.