“Father of the Internet” is Retiring After Nearly 60 Years

Vinton Cerf will step down as Google’s chief internet evangelist next week, ending more than 20 years at the company and concluding one of the most influential careers in technology.

Cerf and Robert Kahn are widely credited with designing the networking architecture and TCP/IP protocols that became the foundation of the modern internet. TCP/IP provides the basic rules that allow different computer networks and devices to communicate with one another.

Cerf began developing and promoting the technology 56 years ago during the 1970s

His work has earned him several honours, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the ACM A.M. Turing Award, and numerous honorary degrees.

Retirement Announced

UC Berkeley professor Dave Patterson acknowledged Cerf’s retirement.

Patterson, who is known for co-developing Reduced Instruction Set Computer architecture, told attendees that Cerf had worked at Google for more than two decades and would retire one week later. The audience responded with applause.

Cerf joined Google in 2005 and has since served as vice president and chief internet evangelist. His work at the company involved supporting internet policy, accessibility, and the continued development and expansion of internet technologies.

Open-Source Panel

Cerf appeared alongside several computer scientists known for creating open-source technologies that have remained in use for many years.

The panel included Patterson; François Chollet, creator of the Keras deep-learning library and co-founder of Ndea; John Ousterhout, the Stanford computer scientist behind the Tcl programming language and co-founder of Electric Cloud; and Matei Zaharia, co-founder and chief technologist at Databricks.

The speakers discussed what developers need to do to create open-source systems that remain useful over time. The subject has become increasingly relevant as companies use open infrastructure to develop new AI products.

AI Centralization

Much of the conference focused on concerns that a small number of well-funded laboratories now control the most advanced AI models.

This differs from the decentralized structure of the open internet, which allowed Cerf’s protocols to spread widely without being controlled by a single company.

Cerf predicted that the growth of AI agents from different developers would eventually force technology companies to adopt common standards.

He said agents from separate sources would need interoperability, composability, and standardized protocols to communicate and work together reliably.

Formal Standards

Some panelists suggested that AI agents could communicate through natural languages such as English.

Cerf disagreed, arguing that the ambiguity of English could make it unsuitable for precise communication between autonomous software systems.

He argued that an agent must know that another agent correctly understands an agreement or instruction before they act together.

Cerf compared natural-language communication between agents to the telephone game, in which a message changes as it passes between several people.

He said the possibility of multiple agents communicating through ambiguous natural language was “kind of terrifying.”

Cerf predicted that formal standards would be needed to prevent misunderstandings between AI agents. Companies that establish those standards early could gain significant influence over how an agent-based digital economy operates.