ICANN Chmn. Cerf Sees International, U.S. Policy Threats to Internet

The advent of internationalized domain names containing non-Roman characters is another cause for concern, Cerf said. He spent 4 hours that day working with someone from Microsoft and another colleague on how to continue the Unicode set of international characters, with its rising number of symbols, without the domain name system collapsing, he said. He called the problems “almost all operational, not technical.” A big one is keeping phishers from registering deceptive domains using newly available characters, he said. Rules on acceptable addresses are needed for “robust deployment” of internationalized names, Cerf said. And “tricky problems” of accidental invalidation of existing registrations as new symbols are introduced must be handled, he said. As Internet participation in Asia nears that in N. America and Europe, it will transform Web content, applications and languages, Cerf said.

Some govts. have banned VoIP service, Cerf said, noting that some govts. rely on conventional telephony for income. Cerf called for efforts to identify Internet applications that could replace it. When Cerf was at MCI, Panama wanted to block VoIP, he said. Officials were told VoIP services could simply switch ports to get around blocking, and that shutting off more ports ultimately would cut Panama out of the domain name system and Internet use.

Cerf objects to deeming VoIP comparable to conventional phone service, particularly for public-policy purposes, he said: that’s “too narrow a concept.” VoIP “has nothing to do with phone calls. It has everything to do with collaborative interaction,” Cerf said. Voice chat accompanying videogaming is a sign of how integrated VoIP will work more broadly.

Cerf sharply restated his and Google’s support for U.S. rules ensuring net neutrality. The location of “broadband service providers” on the other side amounts to seeking laws letting them tell subscribers “we lied” when “we sold access to the full Internet” and intend to provide access only to applications providers that have paid for their bits to be supplied, he said. Access providers say they don’t intend to deny users activity -- only to charge sites for premium service given their massive network investments. Cerf said govt. shouldn’t keep hands off the Internet because incumbents have “market power,” negating any assumption of fair competition. No one objects to charging users more for faster access, Cerf said; he just wishes he could get the far higher speeds at moderate prices users in Japan and S. Korea do, he said.

Generally, legislatures can be prone to pass “technically unsound” laws motivated not by “openness principles” but by campaign contributions -- obliging engineers and others in high tech to dive into politics against their will, Cerf said: “If you don’t, all the technology in the world isn’t going to help you.”

The govt. should enforce neutrality because a cable- satellite duopoly over U.S. broadband deprives subscribers of real choice available through an array of dial-up ISPs, Cerf said. Alternative technologies like broadband over powerline, radio-based broadband like WiMAX and fiber to the home don’t compete effectively with cable modem and DSL, and it’s not clear any will, he said. “Broadband over power has not done very well many places,” Cerf said, qualifying that by noting that of late “serious breakthroughs” have cut costs, avoiding transformers and thereby losing signal.

U.S. agencies sponsoring Internet development “have been stunningly successful in their choices of policy,” Cerf said. He cited the National Science Foundation’s turning the domain name system over to private control, though “commercialization has created stresses and legal disputes and international debates.” The Commerce and State Depts. have increased their work with the Internet, but have confined themselves to policy and governance and avoided technology, Cerf said. Washington should keep financing Internet development that business finds too risky, he said.

Sony has promised to enable its entertainment devices for IP version 6; those devices’ arrival may mean a big push for the protocol, Cerf said. IPv6 can handle the trillion-- plus devices -- 100 per person -- that may be connected in 40 years, and 100-200 billion in the shorter term, he said.

Another problem is how to keep Internet content from becoming an unintelligible “bag of bits” through centuries of software changes, Cerf said. A PowerPoint slide from our time might not be accessible in 3000, he said. Search engines need to start capturing “the software that knows how to manipulate that, and maybe even the operating system” it runs on, as well as the content data that has been collected, Cerf said. Open source isn’t the solution, since its software will evolve, too, he said. Libraries are working on the problem but need high-powered engineering help, Cerf said.

Google is “paying more and more attention to geographically indexed information and mapping,” Cerf said. This will help make available to billions of mobile devices, including vehicles, a wealth of location-based data, he said. Another priority is XML tagging for disclosing a search term’s role in the context of a document. This will improve search results’ relevance, a growing challenge with ever more huge amounts of data on the Net, Cerf said. -- Louis Trager

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After a “major discussion” this month at NASA, Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) is “a major candidate to color” the agency’s future communications architecture, Cerf said. Cerf, a Star Trek fan who played the president’s staff chief on an episode of Earth: Final Conflict, said he has been working on the protocol -- whose store & forward structure resembles e-mail’s -- because the terrestrial Internet’s TCP/IP, which he co-developed, can’t maintain connections between the rotating planets or handle latency like the 40 min. round trip between Earth and Mars. “After 8 years of work, we're starting to get serious traction,” he said. A goal is “to have a 2-planet Internet” by decade’s end, and “by the end of the century perhaps we will have an interplanetary backbone… to support deep-space exploration.” The protocol also is being adapted for civilian and tactical military use on Earth, he said.