Top 117 Quotes & Sayings by Vint Cerf - Page 2

When I helped to develop the open standards that computers use to communicate with one another across the Net, I hoped for but could not predict how it would blossom and how much human ingenuity it would unleash.

Internet and government is Topic A in every nation, all around the world. There is the question of getting the Internet built. That involves persuading government to have regulatory policies. It involves new technology to bring the Internet to rural places.

While the United States has never decreed that everyone has a 'right' to a telephone, we have come close to this with the notion of 'universal service' - the idea that telephone service (and electricity, and now broadband Internet) must be available, even in the most remote regions of the country.

No matter what you do, any country in the world is going to have the ability to set its own rules internally. Any country in the world can pull the plug. It's not a question of technical issues, it's not a question of right or wrong, it's not a question of whether global Internet governance is right or wrong. It's just with us.

What would happen if our clothes were Internet-enabled? Can you imagine if you lost a sock? You could send out a search, and sock No. 3117 would respond that it's under the couch in the living room.

When I joined Google, they asked me what title I wanted. I said, 'What about archduke?' They said, 'Well, that didn't meet our nomenclature. Why don't you be our Chief Internet Evangelist?' This was in 2005.

The Internet is literally a network of networks.

Given that my title at Google is Chief Internet Evangelist, I feel like there is this great challenge before me because we have three billion users, and there are seven billion people in the world.

Governments should look at investment in broadband as a national priority on the grounds that having broadband access for virtually everyone creates opportunities for the development of the economy that wouldn't otherwise be available.

Allowing a handful of broadband carriers to determine what people see and do online would fundamentally undermine the features that have made the Internet such a success, and could permanently compromise the Internet as a platform for the free exchange of information, commerce, and ideas.

I used to tell jokes about Internet-enabled lightbulbs. I can't tell jokes about it anymore - there already is an Internet-connected lightbulb.

Written communication is a tremendous help for me, and so when electronic mail was invented in '71, I got very excited about it, thinking well, gee, the deaf community could really use this, or the hard-of-hearing community as well.

One thing that I can tell you that we have not done very well is to build in broadcast capability into the network, and we don't take advantage of broadcast radio.

Improving the Internet is just one means, albeit an important one, by which to improve the human condition. It must be done with an appreciation for the civil and human rights that deserve protection - without pretending that access itself is such a right.

The immediacy of the mobile changes it from what we're accustomed to in the personal computing world to something that's instantaneous... What's interesting and powerful about the mobile environment is that it's connected to services on the Internet. This augments both platforms.

We have already discovered how quickly we become dependent on the Internet and its applications for business, government and research, so it is not surprising that we are finding that we can apply this technology to enable or facilitate our social interactions as well.

The government has a responsibility to protect society, to help maintain society. That's why we have laws... The rule of law creates a set of standards for our behavior.

The big deal about the Internet design was you could have an arbitrary large number of networks so that they would all work together.

The bottom-up, loosely-coupled, bilateral and multi-stakeholder practices that have created the network of networks we call the Internet allow for a broad range of business models.

Energy, health care and education are just three examples of areas in which information and information management are critically important. How are we using our energy? What appliances in homes or business are consuming the most energy? When do they consume it? Can the load be shifted? How efficient are these devices?

Remember, 'governance' is a big word that includes human rights, freedom of speech, economic transactions on a worldwide basis - it touches everything. It's everywhere, and that's why Internet governance is Topic A in many corners.

While many governments are committed to maintaining flexible regimes for fast-moving Internet technologies, some others have been quite explicit about their desire to put a single U.N. or other intergovernmental body in control of the Net.

One thing we know for sure is that the Web is a collaborative medium unlike any we've ever had before. We see people working together, playing together, interacting in social settings using these media. We hope that will emerge as the new tool for education.

The more we can organize, find and manage information, the more effectively we can function in our modern world.

I think exploring the Internet's - and the Web's - ability to facilitate personal linkages is remarkable; and expect to see additional social networking applications and services emerge.

Will we shoot virtually at each other over the Internet? Probably not. On the other hand, there may be wars fought about the Internet.

Like almost every major infrastructure, the Internet can be abused and its users harmed. We must, however, take great care that the cure for these ills does not do more harm than good. The benefits of the open and accessible Internet are nearly incalculable, and their loss would wreak significant social and economic damage.

You should know that I've been hearing-impaired, not quite since birth, but I've been wearing hearing aids since I was 13, so I'm very conscious of the difficulty of voice communication.

I am annoyed by people that send messages via FaceBook because I get an e-mail telling me there is a message on FaceBook - so I end up processing two messages for every one sent.

One of my favorite books is 'The Swiss Family Robinson.' The reason is, I'm fascinated by the postapocalyptic recovery. What do we do in a disaster? How do we make do?

85% of all video we watch is pre-recorded, so you can set your system to download it all the time. You're still going to need live television for certain things - like news, sporting events and emergencies - but increasingly it is going to be almost like the iPod, where you download content to look at later.

Several authoritarian regimes reportedly propose to ban anonymity from the web, making it easier to find and arrest dissidents. At Google, we see and feel the dangers of the government-led net crackdown. We operate in about 150 countries around the globe.

The Internet of Things tell us that a lot of computer-enabled appliances and devices are going to become part of this system, too: appliances that you use around the house, that you use in your office, that you carry around with yourself or in the car. That's the Internet of Things that's coming.

The idea was that you could grow a system like the Internet one network at a time and then interconnect them. In some sense, the most important thing was the invention of the architecture protocols that enabled the Internet.

For systems in which you already have a lot of hardware and software, change is difficult. That's why apps are so popular.

The post office doesn't guarantee delivery, but it tries really hard. It's called best efforts communication. If you put two postcards in the post-box, they don't necessarily come out then in the same order that you put them in. So, that means that there's potentially disorder with your delivery, and that's also true in the Internet.

I want more Internet. I want every one of the 6 billion people on the planet to be able to connect to the Internet - I think they will add things to it that will really benefit us all.

I can't say I'm particularly happy about all the spam and the viruses and the equivalent that we see on the Net, but I think technology can deal with many of the problems that we're now seeing, whether it's filtering or whatever, and laws may help a lot.

There is a high bar for something to be considered a human right. Loosely put, it must be among the things we as humans need in order to lead healthy, meaningful lives, like freedom from torture or freedom of conscience.

It may seem like sort of a waste of time to play 'World of Warcraft' with your son. But you're actually interacting with each other. You're solving problems. They may seem like simple problems, but you're solving them. You're posed with challenges that you have to overcome. You're on a quest to gain certain capabilities.

You don't have to know how to build an automobile or a television set or a laptop to know how to use it.

Henry Kissinger once told me he was very concerned about the Internet's impact on people's ability to absorb information in a concentrated way, because we've become accustomed to looking up something, getting a snippet and being satisfied with that - as opposed to reading through and considering a weighty tome that goes into great depth.

I just am a huge cheerleader for getting kids interested in science and technology.

History is rife with examples of governments taking actions to 'protect' their citizens from harm by controlling access to information and inhibiting freedom of expression and other freedoms outlined in The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We must make sure, collectively, that the Internet avoids a similar fate.

By 1988, I'm seeing this commercial phenomenon beginning to show up. Hardware makers are selling routers to universities so they can build up their campus networks. So I remember thinking, 'Well, how are we going to get this in the hands of the general public?' There were no public Internet services at that point.

It's important that the adults appreciate that young people are capable of doing really astounding work.

In a town of 3,000 people, there is no privacy. Everybody knows what everybody is doing.

I wore a coat and tie all through high school: my way of being rebellious in the late 1950s.

In 1970, there was a single telephone company in the United States called AT&T, and its technology was called circuit switching, and that was all any telecom engineer worried about.

Writing software is a very intense, very personal thing. You have to have time to work your way through it, to understand it. Then debug it.

At the roots, people are still people. That's why Shakespeare is so popular no matter what the language.

The net's future is far from assured, and history offers much warning. Within a few decades of Gutenberg's creation, princes and priests moved to restrict the right to print books.

Free is not going to go away. Either the advertising model will still work, or there will still be literally hundreds of millions of people who want to put their information on the Net and want people to have access to it.

Although the FCC has tried to introduce net neutrality rules to avoid abusive practices like favoring your own services over others, they have struggled because there has been more than one court case in which it was asserted the FCC didn't have the authority to punish ISPs for abusing their control over the broadband channel.

There is an odd mix of permeability and impermeability in the Net. You won't be able to communicate with everyone, and not every application will be accessible to everyone.

Sorting through what social conventions we ought to adopt for the Internet is a pretty tricky and complicated topic. I think we are just going to live through a lot of these issues until we discover what social norms make sense.

The Internet is a really big tent. In theory, it can support the full range of models, one of which is, 'Here's my information and I'm happy you can use it,' and the other one is, 'Here's the information and you can't have it unless you pay me for it,' and perhaps some things in-between. There is a full spectrum of models.