Vinton Cerf

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.

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.

The Internet lives where anyone can access it.

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

There was something amazingly enticing about programming.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Yet we still see continuous reports of bugs.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

The computer would do anything you programmed it to do.

We live in a very complex world.

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.

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