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New Architect: In your September 2002 speech, "Towards an Information Society for All," you said, "Regulation of telephony, radio, and video services may need to be recast as regulation of monopoly transport methods so as to ensure fair access to underlying media among competing network service providers." How are transport methods being monopolized?

Vint Cerf: The best generic examples include dedicated twisted copper pair lines or optical fiber rings typically owned solely by incumbent local exchange carriers (in the U.S.); hybrid fiber/coaxial cables typically owned by cable television companies; and leased, dedicated spectrum typically owned by wireless data service providers. In general, these facilities are operated by companies that have monopoly control over these resources. I believe that the Internet would benefit from a policy in which any ISP could pay for access to the underlying transport, even if the monopoly operator also offers ISP services. This position is not unlike the view espoused successfully almost two decades ago in the U.S. by MCI. MCI held that all telephone customers should have "equal access" to any inter-exchange (long-distance) carrier. That position launched a highly competitive inter-exchange market. The analogue in the Internet world is that any user should be able to subscribe to any ISP through any underlying monopoly transport medium.

NA: A federal judge recently ruled that the Americans with Disabilities Act doesn't apply to the Web. Should Congress revisit the issue of online access for the disabled?

VC: I hope this question is indeed revisited. The Internet is such an increasingly important source of information that it should be required that reasonable efforts be made by Web-based information services to accommodate subscribers who need assistance in accessing Web content. For example, blind users can benefit from underlying "alternate text" that can be voiced in place of digital imagery on the Web page.

NA: In your recent work to make the Internet interplanetary, are there any issues besides technical ones—such as social, political, or economic—that you've been wrestling with?

VC: Two in particular: access control to protect a valuable and expensive resource, and finding a way to "grow" the Interplanetary Internet step by step as each mission is launched to a different part of the solar system. The developers have in mind the challenge to allow the general public to have access to information resources on the interplanetary system in a way that is both safe and also stimulating.

NA: When the Internet was first entering the popular imagination in the mid-nineties, tech pundits talked about how the Internet would change everything. Is there anything to the hype?

VC: I continue to believe that the Internet provides a universal solvent in which all forms of communication readily dissolve. As more and more mobile devices become Internet-enabled, I believe our societies will become more "online" all the time. It will seem entirely natural that we have answers to questions immediately at our disposal, rather than waiting until we can get access to the Internet from some fixed location.

NA: For the most part, science fiction authors failed to predict the personal computer revolution. Are there any technologies under development to which futurists should pay more attention?

VC: I think that quantum computing may have a very profound effect on the design of software in the future. All of our intuitions are likely to be misleading given the peculiarities of quantum versus conventional computation. Already, I sense that security-conscious programmers are leaning toward elliptic cryptography rather than, say, RSA, because the latter is susceptible to brute force attack.

NA: There seems to be a consensus among futurists that the Internet will eventually become ubiquitous and pervasive. As appealing as the scenario is, I'm unconvinced that software developers can write sufficiently smart, stable code to sustain this vision.

VC: Well, we share a common skepticism, if not fatalism, about software. However, despite these misgivings, I would remind you and your readers that an enormous amount of software services our needs daily, including software in the form of microcode for device controllers. One hopes that higher-level programming will reduce the opportunity to make complex but buggy code. I think we are far from the point where software can be developed with provably secure characteristics.

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