I: What do you think is the biggest threat to the Internet?
Cerf: Apart from the vast challenge of scaling to meet the demand of six billion potential users, Internet may be harnessed for unsavoury purposes. Fraud, surveillance and invasion of privacy are all threats. Our increasing dependence on the Internet places enormous responsibility on Internet service providers and equipment/software developers to make the Internet as robust as it can possibly be. Moreover, it will be vital to establish legal frameworks in support of electronic commerce and to establish jurisdictional and tax practices that are compatible with worldwide operation of the network. Perhaps, in the end, the biggest threat is that our enormous dependence on the Internet will be its undoing, if we cannot evolve the technological, social, economic and legal practices to cope with the intimacy and interdependence of globalisation. Reading E M Forster’s The Machine Stops is as good a warning as any we might ever get, that we must approach the evolution and use of Internet with considerable thought and care. The point of the book is overdependence on technology that isn’t sufficiently robust to justify this dependence. In summary, we have to make sure we match up our dependencies and our ability to produce highly resilient and reliable computer and communications systems.

Public key technology: The keys are used to encrypt or decrypt the messages electronically. Public keys only work one way. You can put something in the safe and lock it, but you need the other key of a “public key pair” to unlock it again. It doesn’t matter which key is used; either one will lock the box while the other has to be used to unlock it.

Multi-protocol Label Switching: This is the Internet’s way of doing what ATM systems have been doing for a while — virtual circuit setup. A “label-switched-path” is a virtual circuit through a store and forward network. The label switching refers to the fact that a frame or packet has a label saying where it goes on its next hop when it gets there; the packet or frame is prefixed with the next hop label.

Policy-based routing: This has to do with the process of deciding whether a given frame, or packet can be accepted into the transmission system for transport. The policy server says whether the originator has the authority to issue a packet requesting any particular quality of service and whether the system can accept another packet for that customer.

Sun Microsystems’ Jini: This connection technology enables spontaneous networking of a wide variety of hardware, software and services.