Government Technology - October 2007 - (Page 28)

One Space to Organize All Your Web Resources My Briefcase 24 C O N T I N U E D F R O M PAG E Track News & Hot Topics Store Videos & Resources Bookmark Whitepapers & Articles Save External URLs/RSS Feeds Take Our Tutorial Today! /briefcase/tour openness, the opportunity to offer arbitrary services, which has given the network its vigor in the economic and innovative sense. For example, when Larry Page and Sergey Brin started Google, they didn’t need permission from an ISP to offer the service. They simply put it up, and if you had access to the Internet, you could go there. There has been a debate under the term “Net neutrality,” a term whose definition has been distorted and twisted in the course of the arguments. But from Google’s point of view, our interest is keeping the network as open as possible. Once the consumer gets access to the network, they should be free to go anywhere in the world to get any application. If you have a device capable of doing Internet, it should be able to use any Internet service. If it’s capable of using the Internet at all, you should be able to download new applications and run them. In the wireless world, that isn’t the case. The platforms, even when they’re Internet enabled, are not open — you may not be able to download a new application unless the wireless provider agrees and puts it on the platform for you. This openness can be seen in different ways, whether it’s open platforms, open applications on the platforms, open interconnection and access to the various Internet-based networks. In the absence of a regime which preserves that openness, the Internet could easily move into a very constrained mode, which makes it look more like cable television. Personally I don’t think that would be a good thing. Not just because of a personal preference for openness, but I believe the economic energy behind the network has been aided by an environment where standards are openly available and any platform is free to implement these standards and then access the Internet. I’m worried the U.S. government, and other governments around the world, may fail to fully understand how important that openness is to the economic benefit of the network. GT: WHEN YOU JOINED GOOGLE, THERE WAS SPECULATION THAT THE COMPANY WOULD CREATE A NATIONWIDE WIRELESS NETWORK. WHAT IS GOOGLE’S VISION IN THAT REGARD? CERF: Speculation about national networking may have come about because of the work we did in Mountain View, Calif., and San Francisco with wireless communication. The Mountain View wireless system was a test case to figure out how to respond to a request from the city of San Francisco for bids to put in free wireless services. We built the Mountain View network just to figure out what you have to do and what it cost, so we could decide if we should actually offer to do this. The San Francisco situation was fairly complex. If you proposed to build such a wireless network, and that proposal was accepted, what acceptance meant is you get to negotiate with something like 29 different jurisdictions around the San Francisco Bay Area. So it’s taken quite a while to work through that. But many people, I think, misunderstood our willingness to be good citizens in this wireless effort as the first step in an attempt to do nationwide municipal networking. At the moment, that’s not a business model we aspire to. Google believes that expanding the Internet and providing more of it to more people is a good thing. It certainly is good for our business model, and we’re not shy about admitting that. But we also think the Internet has been beneficial to the 1 billion people using it today — unfortunately that’s only about one-sixth of the world’s population. So we are interested in taking steps that will encourage more Internet to be built. Whether we do it, or someone else does it, is less important than that it does happen and that more people have access to the information that’s available. The amount of information available on the Net today is astonishing. The quality ranges from terrible to spectacularly good. That information is being generated now more by users of the Net than any others. The consumers have become producers, which is an interesting phenomenon, and has a positive spiral associated with it. The more people share information, the more people get access to that information and use it to invent new things and come up with results. Now at Visit www.govtech.com/cerf for content related to this article. Read more of Vint Cerf’s interview with Government Technology. Watch GTtv video from Vint Cerf’s interview. j j Sponsored by: Confidence in a connected world. OCT_07 28 View a map of Wi-Fi coverage for Mountain View, Calif. j http://www.govtech.com http://www.govtech.com/cerf http://www.govtech.com/briefcase/tour http://www.govtech.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Government Technology - October 2007

Contents Point of View Big Picture The Last Mile GT Spectrum Letters How It Works Cerf on the Net Way Back Machine Separation Anxiety Let's Roll Rising to the Challenge Wednesday Afternoon Fever Parking Possibilities Products Signal: Noise

Government Technology - October 2007

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