Vinton Cerf and the Internet - Essay Example

The development was followed by commercial motives that were aligned to take the internet to a commercial scale. Cerf played an instrumental role in making the internet popular and helped define it in its current state.

TCP/IP forms a part of the internet protocol suite that is the widely used communication protocol over the internet. The complete protocol tends to provide end-to-end connectivity between devices communicating through the internet. The protocol also specifies how data is formatted, transmitted, received, addressed, and routed between the sender and the destination. The internet protocol version four (IPv4) was the first most widely deployed Internet protocol. Even now, the most widely deployed Internet protocol is IPv4. The IPv4 uses the 32 bit (4 bytes) address scheme that limits the total address space to around 4.3 billion users (2^32). This limit was exceeded in February 2011 but this exhaustion had been envisioned for some time already. Development on the IPv6 protocol had been underway in the nineties. The IPv6 protocol was deployed in 2006 on a commercial basis and tends to use 128-bit addresses to produce 3.4 x 1038 addresses for users and devices. Given the expansion in internet services and internet-dependent devices, it was necessary to expand the total number of addresses to accommodate an ever-increasing user base.

In the video, Cerf goes ahead to say that he would like to see an incorporation of authenticity layers to augment the validity of online users. Currently, it is common for internet users to use the internet without much need for authentication. Using this advantage users can surf the internet anonymously and there have been cases of abuse over the internet. Cerf also goes ahead to say that anonymous surfing may actually be necessary in order to protect the identities of people using the internet in states where censorship laws are repressive. This issue is open to debate but Cerf’s point of view is clear that he favors internet user authenticity against an anonymous internet regime.

 The last issue that Cerf talks about is mobility which has emerged as a major requirement for modern internet use. Mobility has become a prominent issue since the next generation of internet devices and their usage promotes the notion of mobility. However, the previous platforms that dominate the internet are not as mobile as required for the modern internet age.