Chief Of Protocol - Company Business and Marketing

Industry Standard, The, Jan 22, 2001 by Steffan Heuer

Vint Cerf made the Internet work. Can he do the same for ICANN?

Vint Cerf has a 13-page resume that can be boiled down to one essential accomplishment: He helped invent the Internet. That was three decades ago, and he's been tinkering with his baby ever since for such diverse employers as MCI WorldCom and the Internet Society.

In November, he was elected to replace Esther Dyson as chairman of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, better known as ICANN. That a brilliant, 57-year-old engineer is now thrust into a highly politicized position at an increasingly fractious quasi-governmental organization is less surprising than one might think. Cerf has spent most of his career trying to make disparate machines talk to each other. Now he is trying to do the same for the people who use them.

Cerf will chair ICANN for only one year, he says, and in that time he hopes only to set a few rules and get out of the way. But the protocols he has made a career of establishing -- notably the TCP/IP standard that is the basis of all Internet communication -- may not work so well in the real world.

There's plenty of need for protocol at ICANN. The nonprofit private corporation, founded in 1998, looks after top-level domains and registries, the central address books of the Web. It is entirely unclear, however, how many top domains the world needs, who should make money selling them and who owns them in the first place. Indeed, in the wide-open territory of cyberspace, it is not even clear how long domain names will be used as placeholders -- or what will replace them.

These are as much questions of money and power as they are of technology. Even as Net activists and telco executives pound their chests, Cerf responds in a voice as dry and neutral as ASCII text. "We are here to create a framework for technical rules," he says a good month into his new job. He wants to avoid a "creeping scope" of tasks, from dealing with trademark disputes to answering questions about policing and taxation on the Net. "That's a potential risk I hope I can retard."

Vinton Gray Cerf was born in New Haven, Conn., in 1943 into an aviation engineer's family. He spent his youth in Van Nuys, Calif., the Los Angeles suburb best known for its thriving hot-rod counterculture. Young Vinton, on the other hand, showed up at school in a jacket and tie and was a bookworm with a passion for math and engineering. Born prematurely, Cerf has suffered from progressive hearing loss his entire life. Part of his shyness in school may have stemmed from the awkward dual hearing aids he began wearing at age 13.

An interest in computers led him first to UCLA, then to Stanford and, after graduating with a Ph.D. in computer science in 1965, to his first job, at IBM in Los Angeles. The emergence of the Defense Department-funded Arpanet in the late 1960s brought Cerf back to the gray area straddling academia and government research,

Fame arrived in the form of a paper he published in May 1974 with lab partner Robert Kahn, "A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication." In it, the two proposed what they called the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, or TCP/IP, which would allow data to be sent between different networks by wrapping it in uniform virtual envelopes containing information on destination, the packet size, number of envelopes on their way, the proper sequence in which to recombine the message, plus a mechanism to let the sender know which envelopes didn't make it and needed to be resent. Nearly three decades later, TCP/IP is still the lingua franca between all machines on the Internet.

Like most engineers, Cerf sees a problem and sets out to solve it. His wife, Sigrid, is a case in point. She, too, is hearing-impaired since suffering a brush with meningitis at age 3. A freak infection years later sent her from impairment, however, to profound deafness. The couple researched alternatives to hearing aids and in 1996 found a specialist at Johns Hopkins to install an electronic inner ear, or cochlear implant. After 30 years of marriage, the Cerfs were able to have a conversation over the telephone for the first time.

Keeping the lines of communication open between business, national governments and millions of Web users is proving to be a tougher challenge. As a welcome gift to Cerf last year, ICANN chose seven new top-level domains the day he took office. The organization had hoped to defuse trademark and intellectual property questions by simply creating more opportunities for trademarking and intellectual property with names like .biz and .health.

Cerf, who says he supports the expansion, compares the decision to a venture capitalist betting on a handful of new players and then letting the market run its course. "We have no idea if the new TLDs will work out as a concept for the Web or as a business," he says. "It's a proof of concept."

But now may not be the best time to emulate the venture model.

As domain names proliferate, users are becoming increasingly confused about what is where. The original top-level domains were, of course, invented to assuage such confusion by replacing Internet protocol addresses (the IPs of TCP/IP fame) with user-friendly names. If you wanted to go to ICANN's Web site, for example, instead of committing its true address -- 192.0.34.65 -- to memory, you could instead simply type www.icann.com into your browser. It would contact one of 13 domain name servers around the world, look up the name and find the actual address. Simplicity itself!