Top 70 Vint Cerf Quotes

Privacy may actually be an anomaly.

I used to tell jokes about Internet-enabled lightbulbs. I can’t tell jokes about it anymore – there already is an Internet-connected lightbulb.

We have already discovered how quickly we become dependent on the Internet and its applications for business, government and research, so it is not surprising that we are finding that we can apply this technology to enable or facilitate our social interactions as well.

The first commercial routers came out about 1986, and services came in 1987.

I was very nervous about going up to teach at Stanford and very nervous even about going to ARPA.

Google Apps for Education is a suite of applications intended to be helpful to higher level educational institutions, but in the long run, I think Google has a role to play in helping to assemble relevant content for classroom use.

The Internet has introduced an enormously accessible and egalitarian platform for creating, sharing and obtaining information on a global scale. As a result, we have new ways to allow people to exercise their human and civil rights.

You don’t have to be young to learn about technology. You have to feel young.

The Internet is literally a network of networks.

First of all, in terms of investment in Internet-related developments, venture capitalists – once burned – are now very cautious and are investing in areas that actually make business sense.

In the larger companies, you have this tendency to get top-down direction.

The three-piece suit has become sort of my trademark. You don’t see them much anymore. It has several benefits: You may be overdressed on some occasions, but you can manage to fit into a huge range of circumstances.

Given that my title at Google is Chief Internet Evangelist, I feel like there is this great challenge before me because we have three billion users, and there are seven billion people in the world.

The big deal about the Internet design was you could have an arbitrary large number of networks so that they would all work together.

I am annoyed by people that send messages via FaceBook because I get an e-mail telling me there is a message on FaceBook – so I end up processing two messages for every one sent.

I expect to see a lot of household appliances on the Net by 2010, as well as autos and other mobile devices.

One of my favorite books is ‘The Swiss Family Robinson.’ The reason is, I’m fascinated by the postapocalyptic recovery. What do we do in a disaster? How do we make do?

Free is not going to go away. Either the advertising model will still work, or there will still be literally hundreds of millions of people who want to put their information on the Net and want people to have access to it.

It’s important that the adults appreciate that young people are capable of doing really astounding work.

Sleep is a waste of time.

What is special about VOIP is that it’s just another thing you can do on the Internet, whereas it is the only thing – or nearly the only thing with the exception of the dial-up modem and fax – that you can do on the public switched telephone network.

I can’t say I’m particularly happy about all the spam and the viruses and the equivalent that we see on the Net, but I think technology can deal with many of the problems that we’re now seeing, whether it’s filtering or whatever, and laws may help a lot.

One thing we know for sure is that the Web is a collaborative medium unlike any we’ve ever had before. We see people working together, playing together, interacting in social settings using these media. We hope that will emerge as the new tool for education.

There is a project that’s underway called the interplanetary Internet. It’s in operation between Earth and Mars. It’s operating on the International Space Station. It’s part of the spacecraft that’s in orbit around the Sun that’s rendezvoused with two planets.

There needs to be some regime that is overseeing access to broadband to make sure we have openess; otherwise, there is a risk it won’t be open anymore. We spent quite a bit of time with Verizon policy people in addition to participating in a multilateral discussion with the Federal Communications Commission.

There is an odd mix of permeability and impermeability in the Net. You won’t be able to communicate with everyone, and not every application will be accessible to everyone.

We’ve never lived in an environment in which it has been so easy to capture information and share it. That fact that it is digital and easy to transmit exacerbates that. I don’t know that we know yet what social norms we wish to adopt.

You don’t have to know how to build an automobile or a television set or a laptop to know how to use it.

The bottom-up, loosely-coupled, bilateral and multi-stakeholder practices that have created the network of networks we call the Internet allow for a broad range of business models.

The internet has become one of the motors of the 21st century economy, allowing all of us to reach a global audience at a click of a mouse and creating hundreds of thousands of businesses and millions of jobs.

Written communication is a tremendous help for me, and so when electronic mail was invented in ’71, I got very excited about it, thinking well, gee, the deaf community could really use this, or the hard-of-hearing community as well.

When I helped to develop the open standards that computers use to communicate with one another across the Net, I hoped for but could not predict how it would blossom and how much human ingenuity it would unleash.

Movie distribution may very well have migrated fully to digital form by then, making a huge dent in the need to print film and physically distribute content.

The Internet is a really big tent. In theory, it can support the full range of models, one of which is, ‘Here’s my information and I’m happy you can use it,’ and the other one is, ‘Here’s the information and you can’t have it unless you pay me for it,’ and perhaps some things in-between. There is a full spectrum of models.

The computer would do anything you programmed it to do.

Several authoritarian regimes reportedly propose to ban anonymity from the web, making it easier to find and arrest dissidents. At Google, we see and feel the dangers of the government-led net crackdown. We operate in about 150 countries around the globe.

The Internet is brittle and fragile and too easy to take down. It’s a conduit for criminal activity. We need international treaties to prosecute the bad guys, but we don’t have them.

Governments should look at investment in broadband as a national priority on the grounds that having broadband access for virtually everyone creates opportunities for the development of the economy that wouldn’t otherwise be available.

There’s nothing special about wireless networks except that wireless capacity is sometimes less than what you can get, for example, from optical fiber.

The purpose behind terrorism is to instill fear in people – the fear that electrical power, for instance, will be taken away or the transportation system will be taken down.

In the earliest days, this was a project I worked on with great passion because I wanted to solve the Defense Department’s problem: it did not want proprietary networking and it didn’t want to be confined to a single network technology.

While the United States has never decreed that everyone has a ‘right’ to a telephone, we have come close to this with the notion of ‘universal service’ – the idea that telephone service (and electricity, and now broadband Internet) must be available, even in the most remote regions of the country.

Their Internet usage is growing very rapidly, and even they can do the math: If everyone in China needed an IPv4 address – just one – this country would use up one third of the entire public IP address space.

We had no idea that this would turn into a global and public infrastructure.

My reaction to a lot of the current situation that we’re in is based in part on a serious concern that the present administration’s course ignores reality.

It may seem like sort of a waste of time to play ‘World of Warcraft’ with your son. But you’re actually interacting with each other. You’re solving problems. They may seem like simple problems, but you’re solving them. You’re posed with challenges that you have to overcome. You’re on a quest to gain certain capabilities.

Remember, ‘governance’ is a big word that includes human rights, freedom of speech, economic transactions on a worldwide basis – it touches everything. It’s everywhere, and that’s why Internet governance is Topic A in many corners.

There has been a substitution of ideology for fact and scientific and engineering data in this administration.

The idea that Google, Yahoo, and eBay are getting a free ride is absolutely unfair criticism. We have to build out our own infrastructure. And we have to inter-connect to the public Internet.

Today we have 1 billion users on the Net. By 2010 we will have maybe 2 billion.

So, for me, working with larger companies has often been very satisfying, precisely because of the ability of bringing critical mass to bear on a given effort.

Virtually any appliance is going to be online. Appliances will talk to each other and to the power-generation system. Our appliances will pay attention to our preferences.

The idea that you can somehow erase the Internet is silly.

To be honest, I joined Facebook as an experiment. I accepted all invitations just to see how many people would ask to be ‘friends’ – it quickly overwhelmed my time to process even the invitations and requests, let alone to actually go there and do anything.