Vint Cerf Quotes

In a small company, you often see a lot more of what goes on in a broader range of things. And that's good.

I think exploring the Internet's - and the Web's - ability to facilitate personal linkages is remarkable; and expect to see additional social networking applications and services emerge.

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.

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

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.

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.

Although I've had several major career changes, I was extremely hesitant about making some of them.

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 is an underlying, fundamental reliance on the Internet, which continues to grow in the number of users, country penetration and both fixed and wireless broadband access.

With Internet technology you can capture a photo, a quote, or an article, store it locally and upload it into the Net more than once, if you wish, to multiple sites. Can you imagine then forcing the search engines to somehow not index that information?

I wore a coat and tie all through high school: my way of being rebellious in the late 1950s.

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.

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.

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.

When I joined Google, they asked me what title I wanted. I said, 'What about archduke?' They said, 'Well, that didn't meet our nomenclature. Why don't you be our Chief Internet Evangelist?' This was in 2005.

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.

Privacy may actually be an anomaly.

We live in a very complex world.

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

Sorting through what social conventions we ought to adopt for the Internet is a pretty tricky and complicated topic. I think we are just going to live through a lot of these issues until we discover what social norms make sense.

The more we can organize, find and manage information, the more effectively we can function in our modern world.

Information flow is what the Internet is about. Information sharing is power. If you don't share your ideas, smart people can't do anything about them, and you'll remain anonymous and powerless.

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.

It doesn't matter if it's a wireless or wired network. I think network management can be introduced that is equally sensible.

The computer would do anything you programmed it to do.

Internet and government is Topic A in every nation, all around the world. There is the question of getting the Internet built. That involves persuading government to have regulatory policies. It involves new technology to bring the Internet to rural places.

Sleep is a waste of time.

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.

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

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.

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

But what we all have to learn is that we can't do everything ourselves.

Allowing a handful of broadband carriers to determine what people see and do online would fundamentally undermine the features that have made the Internet such a success, and could permanently compromise the Internet as a platform for the free exchange of information, commerce, and ideas.

We never, ever in the history of mankind have had access to so much information so quickly and so easily.

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.

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?

Choosing a single most important development is incredibly hard to do because a lot of different things had to happen before the Internet could be deployed in the fashion it is today.

The Internet browser is the most susceptible to viruses. The browser is naive about downloading and executing software. Google is trying to help by releasing the Chrome browser as open source.

Writing software is a very intense, very personal thing. You have to have time to work your way through it, to understand it. Then debug it.

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

Instant messaging and chat rooms have basically created a level playing field for deaf people.

There was something amazingly enticing about programming.

I'm projecting somewhere between 100 million and 200 million computers on the Net by the end of December 2000, and about 300 million users by that same time.

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.

Yet in all those cases I finally steeled myself to seize the opportunity, and find a way to muddle through and eventually conclude that I had, in fact, chosen the right path, as risky as it seemed at the time.

Commercialization of assets off the planet would mutually reinforce the growth of interplanetary communication.

We will have more Internet, larger numbers of users, more mobile access, more speed, more things online and more appliances we can control over the Internet.

You should know that I've been hearing-impaired, not quite since birth, but I've been wearing hearing aids since I was 13, so I'm very conscious of the difficulty of voice communication.

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

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.

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

The government has a responsibility to protect society, to help maintain society. That's why we have laws ... The rule of law creates a set of standards for our behavior.

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

Although the FCC has tried to introduce net neutrality rules to avoid abusive practices like favoring your own services over others, they have struggled because there has been more than one court case in which it was asserted the FCC didn't have the authority to punish ISPs for abusing their control over the broadband channel.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

While many governments are committed to maintaining flexible regimes for fast-moving Internet technologies, some others have been quite explicit about their desire to put a single U.N. or other intergovernmental body in control of the Net.

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.

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.

There's a tremendous amount of energy in Japan and, increasingly, in China.

There's an old maxim that says, 'Things that work persist,' which is why there's still Cobol floating around.

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.

Improving the Internet is just one means, albeit an important one, by which to improve the human condition. It must be done with an appreciation for the civil and human rights that deserve protection - without pretending that access itself is such a right.

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.

We all know the Internet didn't explode until it became a commercial enterprise. Space communication will probably have the same characteristic.

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

There is a high bar for something to be considered a human right. Loosely put, it must be among the things we as humans need in order to lead healthy, meaningful lives, like freedom from torture or freedom of conscience.

The post office doesn't guarantee delivery, but it tries really hard. It's called best efforts communication. If you put two postcards in the post-box, they don't necessarily come out then in the same order that you put them in. So, that means that there's potentially disorder with your delivery, and that's also true in the Internet.

At some point, you can't lift this boulder with just your own strength. And if you find that you need to move bigger and bigger boulders up hills, you will need more and more help.

The net's future is far from assured, and history offers much warning. Within a few decades of Gutenberg's creation, princes and priests moved to restrict the right to print books.

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.

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.