Future of Internet in Robert Kahn’s head

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“It’s interesting to see the progress being made, little progress every year. More new things eventually will lead to major change,” Dr. Robert Kahn told CGTN.

One of the Internet’s founding fathers and the co-inventor of the TCP/IP protocol was speaking at the World Internet Conference which has just come to a close in the city of Wuzhen, east China.

This was his second time at the conference and he told CGTN that he enjoys seeing the changes take place with the baby he helped develop.

One of the key ideas Dr. Kahn has been developing and advocating is Digital Object Architecture, a framework for interoperability of heterogeneous information systems. It is already being used in many applications such as the Digital Object Identifier.

Kahn describes it as a logical extension of the Internet.

Dr. Robert Kahn, one of the Internet’s founding fathers and the co-inventor of the TCP/IP protocol, at the World Internet Conference in Wuzhen. /CGTN Photo

“It’s more like it really isn’t intended to augment the current Internet, it doesn't get rid of anything, but builds upon everything. You can use any part of the Internet that currently exists. And it provides a new capability that makes it easier for people to build applications for managing information,” he explained.

“Let’s say you take this interview, you digitize it and put it up somewhere. And if its created as a digital object, they would have an identifier and you could say I want to see the movie with this identifier with the film clip, rather than saying let me go and search for maybe this one on this machine, it’s this I really have in mind.”

“So it’s really building a powerful infrastructural level that made it easier for people to build applications and services based on information itself rather than just transporting data.”

Current data show that as of June 2017, there were 3.89 billion Internet users worldwide and it has become an indispensable part of daily life.

But 40 years ago, when the Internet was first invented, Dr. Kahn said that no one expected that it would go on to become so influential and powerful.

“In 1973 when I started, we had no expectations of creating an Internet. We had expectations about figuring how to get computers to communicate. Today, I’ve been talking about the importance of moving towards managing data rather than just moving bits. We had no notion back then of an Internet as a collection of computers that could work together.”

“Today people have very little understanding what would it mean to have a collection of digital objects all interacting with each other on a digital informational level,” he said.

But Kahn also admits that far from being an Internet junkie constantly checking Facebook or browsing through Youtube, he only uses it for some activities, chief among them checking his email. He said he’s more interested in inventing the future…but that’s something even Google doesn’t have the answer for.

Pointing to his head, he said “You’re gonna find it up here.”

(CGTN’s Zou Yun also contributed to this story)

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