[LINK] Internet Armageddon all my fault: Google chief

[Bernard Robertson-Dunn]

Internet Armageddon all my fault: Google chief
Asher Moses and Ben Grubb
January 21, 2011 - 4:55PM
SMH
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/internet-armageddon-all-my-fault-google-chief-20110121-19z9i.html

The "father of the internet" says the world is going to run out of 
internet addresses "within weeks" – and it will be all his fault.

Google's chief internet evangelist, Vint Cerf, who created the web 
protocol, IPv4, that connects computers globally, said he had no idea 
that his "experiment" in 1977 "wouldn't end".

"I thought it was an experiment and I thought that 4.3 billion 
[addresses] would be enough to do an experiment," he said in group 
interview with Fairfax journalists.

The protocol underpinning the net, known as IPv4, provides only about 4 
billion IP addresses - not website domain names, but the unique sequence 
of numbers assigned to each computer, website or other 
internet-connected device.

The explosion in the number of people, devices and web services on the 
internet means there are only a few million left.

The allocation of those addresses is set to run out very shortly but the 
industry is moving towards a new version, called IPv6, which will offer 
trillions of addresses for every person on the planet.

"Who the hell knew how much address space we needed?" Cerf said.

"It doesn’t mean the network stops, it just means you can’t build it 
very well."

Google's leadership shake-up

Cerf said Google's surprise leadership shake-up was essential because 
the search giant was beginning to move too slowly.

Today the company announced that Google co-founder Larry Page would take 
over as chief executive from Eric Schmidt, who has become its executive 
chairman. Until this point Page and co-founder Sergey Brin ran the 
company with Schmidt as a "troika".

"As we got larger it was harder for us to move as quickly as we would 
like so I think this is part of the whole practice of speeding up 
decision processes," he said.

"Quick rapid execution is absolutely essential, especially in a highly 
competitive world like this."

Recent ex-Googlers who left the company to join Facebook, including 
former Google Australia engineer Lars Rasmussen, have said Google has 
become too unwieldy as it has grown.

Schmidt gave similar comments in a blog post today, saying that, as 
Google had grown, managing the business had become "more complicated" 
and the trio had been "talking for a long time about how best to 
simplify our management structure and speed up decision making".

Cerf said Schmidt, 55, had been chief executive for 10 years - "a nice 
round number" - and Page, now 37, was ready to lead the company into the 
future.

"Larry and Sergey are 10 years older than they were when they 
thoughtfully hired Eric to be the CEO ... so everybody's growing up," 
Cerf said.

"He was the only guy that stood up to them - these were two young, 
smart, incredibly brilliant guys who literally had just dropped their 
PhDs to go start this company."

It has long been held that Schmidt was brought on at Google to counter 
the lack of business experience of Google's founders, and Schmidt 
alluded to this in a tweet today.

"Day-to-day adult supervision no longer need!" he wrote after the 
leadership change announcement.

Taking on Facebook

Cerf would not be drawn on whether Google was developing a social 
networking site to compete with Facebook, as has been rumoured. But he 
said "our interest is less in the social networking aspect as it is in 
the patterns of behaviour".

"We really don't care about you personally we care about the patterns 
that you make. If we can match the patterns that you make with the 
patterns that the advertisers are trying to get in front of you, you 
benefit as well as the advertisers," he said.

"This is quite independent of the sort of things that go on in Facebook, 
which is more about personal information and personal interactions."

Praising the NBN

Cerf heaped praise on the National Broadband Network, saying Australia 
was making a long-term investment that would "serve you incredibly well 
in ways that even I can't figure out".

"The idea of being able to export your talents without having to export 
your people ... this is a very attractive proposition," he said.

"I honestly envy the political will to make this kind of long-term 
investment."

Google as ISP?

But despite Google's work in building municipal Wi-Fi and experimental 
fibre broadband networks in the US, he said it was unlikely Google would 
ever become an ISP.

"The intent is that as we build these [networks] out we will then turn 
them over to some other parties to operate and to make openly 
accessible," he said.

"This is not our business model. Our purpose was to document what the 
costs and problems are ... we're not in the business of building 
physical infrastructure except for our internal operation."

Asked whether recent privacy breaches at Sydney University and Vodafone 
- both of which kept detailed customer records online - highlighted the 
pitfalls of moving toward hosting everything in the online "cloud", Cerf 
said the cloud was not at fault.

"Just because it's sitting in an enterprise server doesn't mean that 
you're any better protected than you would be in the cloud," he said.

"When you're in the cloud business you better be good at securing your 
systems otherwise you lose all your customers."

-- 

Regards
brd

Bernard Robertson-Dunn
Canberra Australia
email:	 brd at iimetro.com.au
website: www.drbrd.com