Vint Cerf

Vint Cerf

Computer scientist

TED Speaker
TED Attendee

Vint Cerf, now the chief Internet evangelist at Google, helped lay the foundations for the internet as we know it more than 30 years ago.

Why you should listen

TCP/IP. You may not know what it stands for, but you probably use it every day -- it's the set of communications protocols that allows data to flow from computer to computer across the internet. More than 30 years ago, while working at DARPA, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn developed TCP/IP, and in so doing, they gave rise to the modern Internet. In 2004, Cerf was the recipient of the ACM Alan M. Turing award (sometimes called the “Nobel Prize of Computer Science”), and in 2005 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Cerf is a vice president and chief Internet evangelist at Google, and chairman of the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), an organization he helped form; he was also recently elected president of the ACM Council. He served as founding president of the Internet Society from 1992 to 1995. He's an advocate for a truly free internet, speaking out in the face of increasing government demands to limit free speech and connection.

What others say

Henry Kissinger once told me he was very concerned about the Internet’s impact on people’s ability to absorb information in a concentrated way ... I am reminded of the apocryphal story of someone complaining about the invention of writing because it would cause us to stop remembering things.

Vint Cerf’s TED Talk

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