Vinton Cerf talks to James Euchner about the future of the and how it's changing innovation. The continues to create titanic shifts in everything from business models to geopolitics. It affects how companies innovate, how managers manage, and how businesses operate. Vint Cerf is one of the fathers of the Internet, having helped to develop its basic protocols. He has continued to encourage its development-and to be surprised by some of its consequences. In a lengthy conversation, he discusses the future of the Internet; the implications of platforms like the for innovation; the social, policy, and economic consequences of the Internet; and lessons regarding innovation and business management from his experience at Google. The Future of the James Euchner [JE]: Thank you for taking the time to talk with Research-Technology Management . Our readers are aware of your role in the invention of the protocols that created the Internet. Can you start by telling us a little bit about your view of the future of the Internet? Vinton Cerf [VC]: Let me respond to that on several dimensions. The fi rst is the technical dimension, but there are also some interesting and potentially thoughtprovoking policy dimensions as well. On the technical side, plainly, it's going to continue to expand. There are an estimated 2 billion people on the network now. There are probably that many devices, although a lot of them are not publicly visible. There are a large number of mobile devices, and I think that an important technical trend is mobile access to the Internet. There are about 5 billion mobiles in use, and maybe 15 percent of them are capable. That percentage will go up over time. There is increasing bandwidth in the core, and at the edges we're seeing initiatives to increase capacity, both in the wireless and the wired dominions. In the U.S., there's an initiative called the smart grid, which puts electrical power-consuming devices onto the net for purposes of either monitoring their use or controlling them. Standards are being developed for all kinds of electrical devices to be not only part of the electrical network, but also part of an information network. A lot of them will be accessible through the Internet. The idea is that we can learn more about how our lifestyle decisions have an impact on our consumption of energy and other resources. All of this is leading to a much larger Internet of in addition to conventional computers and, of course, people. The far-out trend, of course, is the design and implementation of an interplanetary extension of the to support manned and robotic space exploration. People, when they hear that, think it must be some crazy idea of listening for aliens. But it's really just an engineering effort to make communications richer in the space exploration environment. That effort is being undertaken by NASA, and I've been personally involved in it. JE: You started by talking about the technology implications. Can you talk about policy and social implications? VC: When you get a couple of billion people online, with the freedom to express themselves, all kinds of things happen. There are some bad things; for example, there are stalking and fraud and identity theft among other various kinds of abuse. You see kids beating up on each other, fi guratively speaking, on the net. And, it's stressful for them. It's not a good thing. Fraud, of course, has been with us for a long time, and the is yet another way to commit fraud. The reason it's so troublesome, from the policy point of view, is that it's international in scope, so we have to have common agreements among countries in order to deal with the harm that happens to one person when it's committed by a person in a different country. There are other major problems on the net involving privacy and security. We have people creating viruses and worms and Trojan horses, and we don't necessarily have legal structures or technical frameworks in all countries to deal with them. …