Vinton Cerf Quotes

Science fiction does not remain fiction for long. And certainly not on the Internet.

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.

Information flow is what the Internet is about.

Information sharing is power. If you don't share your ideas, smart people can't do anything about them, and you'll remain anonymous and powerless.

I'd like to know what the Internet is going to look like in 2050.

Thinking about it makes me wish I were eight years old.

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

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.

There was something amazingly enticing about programming.

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

They say a year in the Internet business is like a dog year.

. equivalent to seven years in a regular person's life. In other words, it's evolving fast and faster.

The remarkable social impact and economic success of the Internet is in many ways directly attributable to the architectural characteristics that were part of its design. The Internet was designed with no gatekeepers over new content or services.

Engineers are really good at labeling and branding things.

If we had named Kentucky Fried Chicken, it would have been Hot Dead Birds.

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.

I think imaginative exercises can have a profound impact on the future - what you can imagine can sometimes turn into something you can figure out how to build.

Surf the Web is a happy coincidence.

The computer would do anything you programmed it to do.

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

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

I no longer give Power Point presentations, because I've come to believe that power corrupts, and Power Point corrupts absolutely.

On email and the first instance of spam: This is not for advertising! This is for serious work!

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.

By placing intelligence at the edges rather than control in the middle of the network, the Internet has created a platform for innovation.

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.

Now, more than ever, the Internet must be wielded along with other media to cast bright lights on all who would destroy freedom in the world.

The hackers don't want to destroy the network.

They want to keep it running, so they can keep making money from it.

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.

Power corrupts, and PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.

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.

Instant messaging and chat rooms have basically created a level playing field for deaf people.

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

Privacy may actually be an anomaly.

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.

We live in a very complex world.

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

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.

The last decade of Internet evolution has been marked by innovation. That innovation has been a consequence of the open and neutral access that the Internet has afforded up until now.

It is just a thing. Whether it is good or bad depends what you do with it. If you don't like what you are doing with it then it is simply a reflection of what you are as an individual, an organisation or a society and that is what you have to fix.

I can imagine people actually working in virtual environments where productive, cooperative work is undertaken, and I think we will find people helping others to take advantage of masses of information that are inaccessible or too vast to process in real time today.

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.

Those are all computational engines that are highly distributed and therefore highly robust, .. We're seeing a very significant evolution in the way we even think about computer systems, let alone specific applications.

Yet we still see continuous reports of bugs.

The Internet reflects the societies in which we live, and so the content on the Net and some of the abuses that you see on the Net are reflections of that.

If we do not like what we see in that mirror the problem is not to fix the mirror, we have to fix society.

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

In the Internet world, both ends essentially pay for access to the Internet system, and so the providers of access get compensated by the users at each end. My big concern is that suddenly access providers want to step in the middle and create a toll road to limit customers' ability to get access to services of their choice even though they have paid for access to the network in the first place.

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

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

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

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

I am an optimist by nature and believe strongly that technology can be brought to bear to create alternatives, even in crisis situations.