News Item Dated: 16 October 2002
From: Slashdot  (10/09/02)

ICANN Chairman Vint Cerf addresses how the Internet is changing during an online question-and-answer session. In his opinion, anonymity is an important topic for discussion, because it carries both good and bad uses; he is also concerned about digital rights management legislation and mandates that would limit people's access to information on the Web, such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Cerf thinks that, had he the opportunity to change TCP/IP protocols, he would outline a bigger address space, design it so that every end unit can "authenticate" itself to any other end unit, and offer better data confidentiality by developing end-to-end cryptographic techniques. He notes that the Internet Engineering Task Force has done a good job of developing open standards that help embed interoperability into scores of interacting systems, and is hopeful "that we will sustain and evolve workable mechanisms both for standards development and for the general governance of the Internet, largely in the belief that the system is too valuable not to get the support it needs to satisfy both needs."

Cerf finds that positive developments in the Internet's evolution (information sharing, applications) outweigh the negative (censorship, spam, pornography), while the most surprising development is the deluge of content following Tim Berners-Lee's creation of the World Wide Web. When asked his reaction to John Gilmore's criticism of his leadership of ICANN and the organization's alleged lack of openness with its Board of Directors and the public, Cerf replies that ICANN posts a great deal about its activities on its Web site. He believes that IPv6 will achieve "significant penetration" by 2005, spurred by ease of configuration and an abundance of address space. Cerf also thinks that both people-driven servers and government/corporate control of information will be valued -- a more open environment has its advantages, but shared practices and certain legal frameworks ensure that there are no nasty surprises.

Interested? For further reading, check out this link:
http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/10/09/1315233&mode=thread&tid=95