Internet Pioneer Vint Cerf Calls for Rapid Web Security Enhancements

If there was a common thread to Vint Cerf's wide-ranging remarks at the National Press Club on May 4, it was that pretty much everyone involved in the Internet needs to get better at security.

But Cerf, who is frequently called the "Father of the Internet" and who invented the TCP/IP network protocol, said the world needs to move faster to version 6 of that protocol. Furthermore, he said that governments in general and the U.S. government in particular have to change their thinking about the Internet.

"I'm really proud of the Internet," Cerf said. "It intrigues me that it continues to evolve." But he noted that while he and his colleagues got a lot right when they created ARPANet, the predecessor of the Internet that was created by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, he misjudged a few things. "One of the things we didn't get right was the number of addresses needed. We got it wrong and we ran out of addresses in 2011."