Formative years of Net in steady hands
As a guy who helped teach computers to talk to each other, earning him acclaim as one of the fathers of the Internet, Vint Cerf could have been forgiven a little preening as he handed over the keys to another generation.
But Cerf’s farewell speech last week as chairman of ICANN -- the closest thing the Internet has to a governing body -- was vintage Vint.
The gala at Sony Pictures’ studios in Culver City was devoted to thanking Cerf for his seven years at the helm, which began when it was unclear whether ICANN would survive. Live and taped tributes from around the world praised his work at the powerful private group and in shaping the Internet itself -- including coauthoring the TCP/IP protocols of the 1970s that dictate how information travels on the Net and developing the first commercial e-mail system at telephone giant MCI more than decade later.
Yet Cerf, clad in the three-piece suit that has seemingly been grafted to him since his high school days in Van Nuys, spent nearly his entire speech thanking scores of people by name. (He interrupted that litany mainly to thank the hundreds in the audience for their patience in listening.)
Cerf’s tenure at ICANN has been full of that kind of consensus-inducing graciousness, even though his technical accomplishments are such that he could be a complete jerk and still reign from the pantheon of Internet heroes.
“Vint was a wonderful chairman, and he’s a wonderful guy,” acknowledged Karl Auerbach, the man who may have been Cerf’s most dogged adversary at ICANN. Over the years, Auerbach has objected that ICANN does too much business behind closed doors.
Time and again, Cerf has defused angry critics by listening intently, asking questions and listening some more. As a result, ICANN’s future seems surer than ever -- secure enough that Cerf, who initially wanted to stay chairman for a single year, can finally retire from the Marina del Rey-based nonprofit organization and go back to his two or three other jobs.
When not toiling as one of Google Inc.’s top theorists or on plans at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to extend the Internet into space -- that is, mainly between 3 and 6 a.m. -- Cerf plans to continue writing five books. Simultaneously.
“Generally I prefer to avoid sleep -- it’s a waste of time,” Cerf said in an interview after his ICANN send-off.
That kind of energy has kept Cerf, alone among the Internet’s founding fathers, constantly involved in the fast-changing medium’s evolution.
“He certainly kept in the game, and I give him a lot of credit for that. There’s a lot of people who had one-offs,” said Leonard Kleinrock, the UCLA professor who published the first paper on electronic message switching and was supervising Cerf and other graduate students when the team developed rules for the Arpanet, the Defense Department precursor to the broader Internet.
Cerf’s approach to leadership echoes some of his early convictions about what would make giant computer networks function best. Those principles include having little central control and having as many machines as possible working together, even if their functions are different.
“We adopted the consensus style from the technology of the Net,” Cerf said.
Under a 9-year-old deal with the Commerce Department, the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers has the seemingly straightforward job of running the domain-name system for website addresses. Mostly, ICANN has to ensure that everyone who registers a site gets a unique number to go with it, and that when someone types that site’s name in their Internet browser they get sent to the right place.
But ICANN has had problems from its first breath in 1998. Some critics didn’t see why the United States should get to keep control of the Net’s underpinnings, even through a proxy. Others didn’t see why the public should lose control to a private group that didn’t have to answer to anyone.
Beyond that, while ICANN has always maintained that it serves a narrow, technical function, there are social, economic and political implications to much of what it does.
Examples: Why should it be so hard to set up new “top-level” domain names, such as .com and .info, which would create more competition to the companies that manage sales in existing domains? Why is it taking so long for languages that use non-Roman letters to get their own top domains? And why must the “whois” database still publish addresses and phone numbers for everyone who registers a site, even when many of those people are private citizens?
“They have set out a nearly impossible mission for themselves, governing the Net and not doing so,” said Kevin Werbach, a Wharton School of Business professor who has known Cerf since Werbach helped chart Internet policy at the Federal Communications Commission during the Clinton administration.
“It’s extremely important for ICANN to have a certain amount of moral and technical authority, and Vint has that in spades.”
It doesn’t hurt that Cerf is gregarious and funny. He told reporters last week that he was “departing from my position as chair and looking forward to being a sofa or something.” A devoted “Star Trek” fan, Cerf advised producer Gene Roddenberry’s widow on the TV series “Earth: Final Conflict,” where he had a cameo.
By being eminently reasonable, he managed to talk most issues into dormancy, shunting them aside into committees that tend to call for more studies.
“Vint is wonderful at keeping these things from bubbling up into open warfare,” said Auerbach, a technology expert at Cisco Systems Inc. who was among a small group of directors voted in before ICANN dropped such elections.
The main drawback to Cerf’s approach, ICANN foes say, is a lack of public accountability.
“Vint and the technology people have always been against more voting and more democratic forms of representation,” said Milton Mueller, a Syracuse University professor and partner in a policy research effort called the Internet Governance Project. “The strong part about that is you maintain stability and vet people into an inner circle. The bad part about it is that it creates a groupthink mentality and is sometimes insular.”
On Friday, ICANN’s board picked New Zealand intellectual property lawyer Peter Dengate Thrush to succeed Cerf as chair.
Cerf is delighted that none of this is his problem anymore, especially because he doesn’t see grounds to worry about the ultimate outcome. ICANN “has earned a place in the Internet governance structure,” he said, “and it’s here to stay.”
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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
Internet dad
Who: Vint Cerf
Age: 64
Claim to fame: One of the major architects of the Internet
Occupations: Outgoing chairman of ICANN, which is responsible for Internet stability, website addresses and other Internet issues. Vice president at Google Inc. Distinguished visiting scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Education: Bachelor’s degree in math from Stanford University, master’s degree and doctorate in computer science from UCLA
Residence: McLean, Va.
Family: Met future wife Sigrid at a hearing-aid store; she became profoundly deaf at the age 3. Cerf has severe hearing loss and is assisted by hearing aids. They have two sons, David and Bennett.
