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(Music)

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(Applause)

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Some time ago, a man named Bob Metcalfe invented the Ethernet,

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in 1973, about a mile and a half from where I was working at Stanford,

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working on the Internet.

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And a few years later, Bob announced that the Internet was going to experience a gigalapse,

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and he published an article on the subject.

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And it didn't happen.

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And, to his credit, he took his newspaper article,

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ran it in a blender, and ate it on the stage.

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(Laughter)

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After first checking to see if the ink might be toxic or not.

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June Cohen: (Laughs)

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Vint Cerf: Now, it's absolutely true that the Internet is getting bigger and bigger,

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and more and more ubiquitous.

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It's going to be in just about every appliance we can think of.

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The question is, does that mean it's all going to collapse?

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I don't think so.

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But I am willing to accept the proposition that

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we should think about that.

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Already there are changes being made to the Internet to make it more resilient,

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to make it more resistant to some of the problems

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that you see in the headlines every day.

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This is not a static system.

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This thing is still evolving,

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Even though the design was done 40 years ago,

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it has evolved over that period of time,

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and it continues to change.

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That's the one thing that makes this network so unusual,

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it wasn't designed to do any thing in particular.

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And that's why it's been able to do almost anything

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we can think of to program.

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So I'm ready for Plan B, if Danny has a specific idea,

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but I have the feeling that by making it more and more ubiquitous,

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it's going to be pretty hard to shut it down.

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When you look at all the things that happen,

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the various and sundry attacks, which really do happen,

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the malware that floats through the network, and everything else,

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aren't you amazed that it still works?

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I mean, look, if you know too much about something

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it's always astonishing that it works at all.

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Every time I get a web page that comes up,

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I'm sitting here thinking

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"Holy Crap, it actually worked."

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(Laughter)

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And, you know, when you know all the things that have to happen,

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you think "Ha! That's impossible."

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So, it has been stunningly resilient.

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It has grown by a factor of a million or more,

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since it was first turned on in 1983,

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but something new could come along.

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I'll give you a good example.

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There was this thing called the telephone network.

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It was invented around 1876.

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Today, the telephone network is turning into the Internet,

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because all the voice is being run over IP, and everything else.

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So that means you can build a big thing,

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and that doesn't mean something else won't come along.

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So it may not be Plan B to preserve the Internet,

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it may be Plan C to invent something new.

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Actually I believe it would be prudent to do two things.

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One of them we've already started doing, this is called "clean sheet."

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The question is, what if we started over and redesigned the network,

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what would we do differently?

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I know one thing I would do, I'd pick 128-bit address space instead of 32 --

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JC: Who wouldn't? 
VC: -- so we wouldn't have to go through the IPv6 transition.

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And I'd also work hard on more security.

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But, nonetheless, I think that the clean sheet phenomenon,

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the clean sheet exercise, lets you do two things.

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It lets you see what would you do differently, what would it look like,

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and then you can ask, well,

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can I retrofit any of those ideas into the existing network?

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That's happening.

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The second thing, I think, is to ask the question,

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what could I do to create a communication environment

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that's even better than the Internet?

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I don't know what the answer is, although it might turn out to be

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quantum communication, which the physicists tell us is not possible,

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but then, they told us a lot of things are not possible,

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so, who knows? In 10 years' time maybe we will see something different.

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Right now, I think we'll manage okay.