Investing in internet infrastructure

By Rebecca Goozee, Deputy Editor

In an exclusive interview, Vint Cerf, internet pioneer and currently Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google, explains why infrastructure development is more important than ever in a tight economy.

“Creating incentives for industry and the private sector to both build the underlying infrastructure and then participate in inventing new ways to use it is the direction that we want to be heading in”
-Vint Cerf

When Vint Cerf speaks about the web, people sit up and listen. Widely thought of as the founding father of the internet, Cerf, along with research partner Robert Kahn, designed the TCP/IP protocols that govern data transfer across the net along with its basic architecture. In 2005, the pair received the highest civilian honor bestowed in the US, the Presidential Medal of Freedom – recognizing the fact that their work on the software code put them “at the forefront of a digital revolution that has transformed global commerce, communication and entertainment”. For many, Cerf is as close as you get to internet royalty.

However, it’s a title he’s reluctant to accept. “The internet has many fathers; there are lots of people who’ve contributed,” he says. “This is very much a collaborative effort, and over the history of the internet you’ll find that tens of thousands – maybe by this time, hundreds of thousands – of people have contributed over the years. This is one of those wonderful ideas where everyone has an opportunity to contribute – and they do! And that’s the real magic and power of the internet. It’s an open environment that everyone has an opportunity to share in and to contribute to, and that’s exactly what’s happening.”

Indeed, the idea of openness and collaboration – and of sustaining the internet as an open network for consumer choice and innovation – is a subject close to Cerf’s heart. “Google believes in a very open internet environment,” he explains. “One where everyone has the opportunity to try out new products and services without discrimination. We also believe that you have a right to know exactly what you are getting. Suppliers of internet service need to be clear about expected performance and what you are paying them for.”

In Cerf’s view, the internet should be an egalitarian entity used by anyone and everyone, one where suppliers of the service are unable to discriminate against a user merely because of who or where that user is. “We are arguing that the internet should be nondiscriminatory in terms of its access, although we accept the argument that for larger capacity you may have to pay more,” he says. “What we are after is an open environment where both consumers and suppliers of applications are treated fairly.”

Investment
Naturally, in order to attain the open environment that Cerf is so keen to see happen, the infrastructure itself needs investment. But in a tight economy, are companies in the mood to invest in internet infrastructure? “We have a situation where the incentives for companies providing internet access are distorted by a natural desire to maximize their investment to the detriment of innovation,” concedes Cerf. “I think we need to provide adequate incentives for all parties, those providing underlying facilities and those providing value-added services, to have fair and nondiscriminatory access to the underlying bit-carrying capacity of the internet. Monopolizing provision of service does not produce innovation; in fact, it sometimes inhibits it. People want to know why they should invent a new, less expensive solution when they are able to charge more money for their service by sticking with the old way of doing it.”

However, Cerf sees innovation as critical to long-term prospects, and as a result insists there must be some kind of incentive for investors to create the appropriate infrastructure. He believes that there will certainly be opportunities to find ways to invest in infrastructure, particularly in light of the current financial crisis. “Perhaps there are subsidies that could be provided? Maybe there are other tax benefits that could be provided? What we need to do is be creative about providing incentives for building infrastructure, and at the same time ensure that it is as openly accessible as possible to all parties who want to innovate on top of it,” he explains. 

He likens the shared asset to a road system – everyone drives on it and the roads are used simultaneously by lots of different users – which is exactly how packet switching works. “Packet switching may be a way, like the road system, to allow people to share common infrastructure,” says Cerf. “From my point of view, in order to create broadband access there needs to be a financial or other business incentive, whether that’s R&D tax credits or credits related to revenue gained on new investment – if there are ways of providing incentives to business for creating openly sharable infrastructure, then that’s a hint of the direction in which one might go in this current climate where at least the present legislation is intending to provide a substantial amount of government support for investment in infrastructure of all kinds.

“Creating incentives for industry and the private sector to both build the underlying infrastructure and then participate in inventing new ways to use it is the direction that we want to be heading in.”

21st century infrastructure
But away from the development of the internet infrastructure itself, Cerf sees great potential for expansion of internet services and applications. For example, during the Great Depression, President Roosevelt deliberately created a massive investment in physical facilities and infrastructure in the US, and Cerf believes that there is now a reasonable need and opportunity to do something similar in the current climate. However, he maintains that it is of vital importance to invent 21st century versions of those infrastructures. “I want to build the 2010 version of infrastructure,” he says. “So we need to ask ourselves technologically, what kinds of infrastructure could we build? What kind of infrastructure would create more opportunities for businesses to invent new products and services? In Roosevelt’s case he focused on this in the midst of horrible turmoil and joblessness; he saw an opportunity. They say opportunity lies on the edge of chaos – maybe that’s going to be true today too.”

Ideas for the 2010 infrastructure include ensuring that every new mile of highway or bridge that is built has conduits built-in so that it could carry fiber. This way the road wouldn’t have to be dug up later in order to pull fiber along that particular length of road. Other examples include the use of so-called Smart Grids. “For the first time in history, we may have the opportunity to not only adapt our supply of electrical power to demand, but have control over some of the energy-consuming devices in businesses and residences. We can communicate when to run the hot water heater or the air conditioning in order to moderate peak-load demand, and if we manage the demand as well as the supply, then we may be able to avoid investing huge amounts of money in peak load capacity that we only use two or three percent of the time. Similarly, if we’re investing in new electrical grid distribution media, maybe that same framework will allow us to also invest in new high-bandwidth telecommunications facilities, fiber being an obvious example.”

It’s about exploring the possibilities, and at the end of the day Cerf sees huge potential in terms of the opportunities the internet opens up for the businesses of tomorrow. “I think what companies need to do is to examine the products and services that they offer and the means by which they make those things known to others and ask themselves how the internet can enhance their ability to draw attention to their products and services – or even to deliver their products and services,” he says. “Google is an example of this. Our business is the selling of advertising, but the advertising is incidental to the use that most people make of our products and services – they’re looking for information, and we try to help them find it. Take Google Maps or Google Earth, for example. We didn’t get any direct revenue from the Google Earth or Google Maps system, although we have advertising related to it, and if people are there taking advantage of information that others have provided and also can see related information coming from our advertising, people click on the ads, and that generates revenue for us and sometimes also for the other people who provided the information.”

Business opportunities
Almost invariably, improvements in technology lead to opportunities in the business world – whether by making it less expensive to provide a product or service, or by creating entirely new businesses or industries that nobody had ever thought of before. Cerf cites a couple of examples.

“Look at education. Here, the product is learning; but technology opens up new opportunities with regards to how you deliver it. For many years, the way you delivered it was by having a professor up on the podium and students sitting in chairs taking notes. But we now recognize that not everyone can afford to go on a four-year course at a college and devote themselves exclusively to that. Nonetheless, they still have to learn new skills and knowledge in order to maintain the edge that they need for the jobs they’re doing. So the university, which is providing education as a product, needs to package not only the four-year degree and the two-year degree, but also the two-week special course or the part-time MBA program. In this instance, repackaging the product of education and delivering it through the network could be a very powerful revenue enhancer, to say nothing of growing a market that doesn’t exist compared to residential colleges.”

The second example is that of information sharing. “People increasingly rely on information in order to keep their lives organized, whether it’s calendars, keeping track of their stocks, or keeping track of medical records,” he explains. “Most people probably visit more than one doctor and have medical records scattered around on physical paper in different offices. This means when someone new asks you for your medical records, you don’t have an easy way of gathering the data. So if we had common ability to record our personal medical records, we could supply that information more easily and accurately – making this information more easily discoverable and analyzable is a powerful tool.”

Google has a number of applications that help people manage this information, such as Google Docs and Spreadsheets, and Cerf insists that it is the increased level of collaboration provided by advances such as cloud computing that is making the difference. “Companies that are trying to help people analyze, evaluate and accumulate their information can take advantage of the internet – and in some cases, of what Google offers – to help people organize their information and evaluate and analyze it.”

The value of collaboration
It is this quality that most inspires Cerf about working for Google – the company’s commitment to organizing the world’s information and making it accessible and useful. “That’s an honest motivation,” he says. “It’s true. The company really believes that this is what it wants to do, and that’s what people who work for Google want to make happen. I’m one of them, but just one of 20,000. It’s a wonderful feeling to have a company whose leadership believes that motto and wants to make it happen.”

He believes one of the keys to the organization’s success is its ability to deal with scale – particularly given the rate at which information flows into the internet, the rate at which it changes and the rate at which Google has to keep track of that. The ability to manage all of that change and all of that increase quickly and responsively is really stunning,” he enthuses. “When you walk into one of the Google data centers, which most people are not gonna be allowed to do, it’s awe-inspiring. The physical scale of the facilities, and the number of machines that are made to work together – both the hardware and the software – is frankly mind-blowing.”

Cerf also cites the firm’s internal structure – the quality of people it hires and their ability to work together and share information – as important. “The willingness to share internal information with a fairly significant part of the entire company really helps improve its likelihood of success,” he says. “One thing I’ve learned about companies that are successful is that virtually every employee, whether they are cleaning the floors or the CEO and everything in between, have a pretty good idea of how the company makes money. And if people understand how the company works, then they can reasonably ask the question – and I hope they do – of whether what they are doing today is helping the company do what it’s trying to do.” 

Ultimately, however, it is technology that really excites him. “For the first time in human history, computers are allowing us to magnify and leverage our brain power, whereas in all the previous history what we’ve done is magnify and leverage our muscle power,” concludes Cerf. “This is a big change in our human civilization where we’ve mechanized something that never has been mechanized before.” And it is this –Google’s ability to leverage the power of the human brain to make it more capable than it ever has been in the past – that truly sets it apart.

Business insight
Google’s basic model is to organize the world’s information and make it accessible and useful – a goal shared by champions of enterprise mobility. Carl Rodrigues, President and Chief Technology Officer of SOTI Inc., gives Business Management an insight into the role of device management solutions in enterprise mobility.

How is information on the move revolutionizing the modern enterprise?
CR. From field-service to retail to healthcare, mobile devices facilitate the movement of information between key stakeholders like customers, employees and management. Device management solutions that support the collection, security and distribution of data via mobile devices and that allow organizations to support mobile field-workers are needed to realize the potential of information on the move.

And what impact is the convergence of fixed, mobile and internet services having on today’s business environment?
CR. The mobilization of information drives the creation of improved products and services, and facilitates the conversion of real-time information to competitive advantage. As a result, companies must ensure the uptime of their data collection devices with solutions that allow them to manage, support, secure and track their mobile field-force in real-time.

The combination of improved data networks, better data-collection devices and mobile device management software allows enterprises to improve products, services and customer responsiveness. Fixed-mobile-internet convergence will accelerate this by making services more accessible and appealing.

The future of the internet?
“Frequent speculation is that somehow as the internet gets larger and larger and more computers with more software and more memory flow into it that someday it will simply wake up and become self-aware. I am somewhat skeptical of this, although I will say that as we provide the internet with more and more information – and in particular the ability to experience the world the way we do through video cameras, microphones and sensors – the internet could potentially have a kind of sensory system like human beings do. 

“The question is, ‘How does the internet experience that information?’ In a human being, the information is sensed through our neural system and then goes into a neural network in our heads. The neural networks are extremely complex, and they are quite malleable. In fact, the imposition of sensory data into the brain physically affects the way in which the brain evolves. The internet could conceivably affect a similar kind of evolution, but it might require human beings to change the software because we don’t have self-programming systems at this stage of the game. 

“I think, though – in my science-fiction speculative moments – that if the internet could interact with the environment in ways like human beings interact that we might someday actually find that the internet or its successor could become self-aware. For me that’s still science fiction. But you can certainly see on another axis here that – independent of self-awareness – the network and the sensory systems associated with it can handle much more information than any individual human being could handle and could process that information with all the huge computing power that’s available, and so that’s a different kind of intelligence than what you and I have.”

This article first appeared in CXO Europe magazine: www.cxo.eu.com/article/Issue-12/Lead-Features/Investing-in-Internet-Infrastructure/