THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, November 27, 1994 TAG: 9411270293
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D1 EDITION: FINAL
SERIES: Internet Issues
LENGTH: Long : 117 lines
Vinton Cerf is often called ``The Father of the Internet'' because he helped create the first Internet protocols in the early 1970s. Now, more than 20 years later, the popularity of the Internet is booming, and companies are racing to market Internet services. In the past two weeks, both MCI and Microsoft have announced their own forays into the on-line universe. Cerf, one of the architects of MCI's internetMCI talked last week with staff writer Richard Grimes about the Internet and MCI's role in its future. Here are excerpts from that interview.
Q: You've been referred to as the father of the Internet. How did you help to create the Internet?
A: First of all, one other guy is given credit. His name is Robert Kahn. He's president of a company called CNRI these days. But he and I developed the original design for the system way back in 1973.
The second point is that anything that is this big and successful only works if there's an awful lot of people who've devoted time, energy and even careers to it. This credit needs to be spread around to an awful lot of people. I don't want you to come away thinking that it's the product of one or two guys. It's the product of thousands of people.
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Q: Some say you literally sketched out your ideas for the Internet on the back of an envelope. Is that the way it happened?
A: Well, I sketched out the basic design for connecting the nets together with gateway ideas on the back of an envelope. . . . Of course, there was lots of sweat, blood and tears after that envelope to get it right. It's incredibly complex to deal with all the cases that you have to deal with.
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Q: Did you have any idea that the Internet was going to be as big as it is now?
A: Absolutely not. I had always hoped that it would become a useful technology for the people who were paying for it - in that case, the Defense Department. It was very clear when the National Science Foundation got into the picture in the mid-'80s that this was going to become very important and has become an important infrastructure for research and education. But it's only in the last year or two been clear that this is going to be the next telephone network. -
Q: You've been one of the most visible champions of the Internet. How is your work at MCI going to improve the Internet?
A: I think anytime you start talking about scaling up into national and global scope, you have to have a lot of resources to make a system this big operate well and reliably. MCI is one of the few companies in the world that has those resources. It has a major investment in the transmission and switching systems at the low level of moving bits around, which will be needed as the demand for capacity on the Internet continues to grow. But more importantly, there has to be a big investment in people to help operate systems like this on a 24-hour-a-day basis. And, as we work our way up the food chain to applications . . . you need to have customer service people who are not only well-trained but plentiful.
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Q: What features of InternetMCI are going to differentiate it from competitors like Microsoft's recently announced on-line service?
A: MCI is entering this market on many different levels. We have sold and will continue to sell transmission capacity to those people who want to build pieces of Internet on their own. We provide access to Internet for people who build private networks. But we also enter into this market at the level of transit service for other network service providers who may have, for example, regional networks. Eleven of the regional service providers are connected to the MCI backbone. They use MCI's transit service to connect themselves into the global Internet.
With Network MCI's Marketplace package, we are beginning to enter into both a consumer and a merchant market where we sell service of putting people up in storefronts for the merchants and helping the customer get to those storefront through the Internet.
Microsoft is not likely to go and string the optical fiber to build anything parallel to MCI's national backbone. So, they're going to have to purchase either dedicated services to build their own piece of Internet - which is doubtful - or they're going to buy access to the Internet. Today, their access to the Internet is through NorthwestNet. We service NorthwestNet's access into the rest of the Internet universe. So, Microsoft is our customer in that sense - not at all an unusual circumstance.
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Q: How much traffic does MCI currently handle on the Internet?
A: Because we have the 11 regional networks connecting through our backbone to get to the rest of the Internet, we estimate that we carry about 40 perrcent of the domestic traffic in the U.S.
There are other service providers who are carrying traffic, but we hope over time people will be attracted to come to the largest, best-connected, and we think, best-managed Internet backbone service.
But this is not something that any one company can simply lay claim to all the territory for. That's not how the Internet works. There'e 42,000 networks in the system, and next year at this time, there'll be 80,000.
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Q: Since you've been with the Internet from the beginning, you've had a chance to see it grow up. Is there any way the Internet is being used that you're uncomfortable with or you think is absolutely ridiculous?
A: I don't think that there are any ridiculous uses. Let me see if I can liken this to the difference between growing up in a small town and then going back and discovering that the small town has become New York City. With a system that's gotten this big and this global, even it only has 20 million users; they are still in 84 countries. The cross-section of users touch on every possible piece of society and business. There are people who use the network for things I wish they wouldn't. But that's true of the printing press. We have to expect that in an environment that is this global and this deeply penetrated. The result of that is that I have to accept the idea that along with this deep penetration into the fabric of our social and economic structure, that there will be abuses of the technology. Where those abuses are illegal, I hope they're prosecuted. Where they're considered socially reprehensible, I hope that people will apply pressure.
There are a lot of things we put up with here in the U.S. because of our love of freedom. I think that we have to accept that the Internet environment will reflect the social structure that it's embedded in. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Vinton Cerf
by CNB