The lecture room HG F1 was full to bursting with over 300 people and 95 per cent of the audience were men. The front row was occupied by a handful of Google staff whose real task was to recruit interested ETH-members during the offer of refreshment following the presentation. After a short introduction by the host Thomas Gross, ETH Professor at the ETH Institute for Computer Systems, Vint Cerf took over the stage.

Cerf began his talk with an analogy from the 1980s. At the time, his employer, MCI, charged a dollar for the delivery of an e-mail. Today, though, the contrary happened. While nobody was prepared to pay for the delivery of an e-mail nowadays, many users, plagued with junk and spam mail, were actually prepared to pay not to receive certain e-mails. Future developments in telephone communication would take the same route. Owing to the duopoly of fixed lines, most users today only had the choice between a telephone or TV cable connection. Here Cerf fears possible abuse of power by the access providers. He sees solutions in dense wireless networksand direct cabling of households, for example via the sewer pipes.

Tim Berners-Lee had released an avalanche of information with his creation of the Web, explained Cerf, and promptly placed an ad slogan for his employer, "Now it is up to companies like Google to organise this information and ensure its accessibility via the internet“. Cerf cited the example of the "Digital Library" project, in which millions of books are digitalised to make full-text searches possible.

With quick repartee Vint Cerf answered the–sometimes critical–questions raised by the audience at ETH Zurich. large

Controversial censorship in China and the positioning of ads

Surprisingly, Google's evangelist did not wait for questions from the listeners to raise politically delicate subjects. For instance, the order of succession of so-called AdWords, small ads in the commercial right-hand side of Google's search results. To determine the order in which such ads are listed, after every search Google used a secret algorithm that carried out a "mini-auction" among the advertisers, explained Cerf. He denied, however, that simply the ad that paid most for the entered search term always appeared at the top of the list.

Cerf defended the recent controversial consensus reached between Google and the Chinese government to censure regime critical information by saying that at least Google declared when the information resulting from a search had been censured. Asked whether in future we had to fear that Google would become an over powerful information monopolist, Cerf replied that everyone was free to use another search engine.

Vint Cerf, Google's "Chief Iinternet Evangelist", presented his vision of an intergalactic network with a good measure of wit: "Don't misunderstand me; Google isn't planning to take over the solar system." large

"Nobody rules the internet"

Eventually, Vint Cerf got around to talking about the regulation of the internet. One of the reasons for the UNO World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), he considers, was because governments of numerous countries could not come to terms with the fact there is no global body responsible for regulating the internet. Many governments had discovered the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) (1), of whose board he chairs. But ICANN only had the responsibility for the administration of a few addresses and numbers; this is how Cerf played down the considerable influence of ICANN. Nor did he mention the fact that it operates under the authority of the US Trade and Development Agency. He maintains his claim that nobody rules the internet. "But the governments of the world don't like to hear this." This is why it was decided at UNO's most recent WSIS, that the UN was to establish an "Internet Governance Forum“ (2), in order to steer the future development of the internet (cf. box below).

That a number of privacy problems remained to be solved in future internet applications, was illustrated by Cerf in an entertaining way, using examples of the RFID radio chip that could locate a missing sock or the linking of an internet fridge to the bathroom scales.

Lapland as a model for an interstellar internet

Finally, Cerf came to speak about his favourite project: the interplanetary network. Because in future, he said, space missions, for example to Mars, would become even longer, and so the importance of space communication would continue to grow. But today's internet protocols, based on TCP/IP, would not be suitable for this. The distances between planets were simply too great; and packets of data would be in transit for too long–even at the speed of light–which would lead to disturbances. As a possible solution Cerf proposes the re-packaging of streams of data and relaying them from planet to planet, like e-mails. Such a system is currently being tested in Lapland where data transmission is assured by snowmobiles equipped with laptops, making data communication between individual villages possible.