Vint Cerf, official Internet Evangelist for Google, said that Asia will change the Internet landscape at the second day of the Pacific Telecommunications Council annual meeting, PTC’09. He pointed out that as more and more people from Asian cultures get online, their presence will require older users of the Web to accommodate their distinct cultural patterns and behaviors. “One ... [implication] is that for any company that is interested in doing business using the information through the Internet needs to recognize that the markets are more demographically diverse than they ever have been before,” he said in a video interview. He continued by saying that any company who wishes to do business on the Internet is going to be required to have facilities or at least local experts in every single major demographic area in the world. “Google has discovered that,” he pointed out, “I mean that’s why we have offices in a number of places around the world – in order to adapt to the requirements of the region.”
He also spoke about changes to the domain name registry system of the Internet, in a later session saying that domain names will be allowed to contain non-Latin characters. This means that web site addresses and email addresses will be able to be created in any alphabet including Korean, Chinese, and Japanese. There are still some security concerns, which are taking time to resolve. “This doesn’t necessarily result in a more secure system exactly because with all these new symbols available, it may be more possible for people to become confused,” said Vint Cerf. He gave a simple example of creating the domain name paypal.com but using a Cyrillic A in the name, which would be an entirely different web site address from the actual paypal.com. Preventing this possibility from happening is an important step in implementing the support for the entire world’s character set.
Other topics which Mr. Cerf touched on were geographically-indexed information becoming more valuable as more people are accessing the internet via their mobile phones, and the physical topography of the Internet shifting to support the large populations in Asia which are accessing it. As an example, he pointed to Seoul, South Korea, saying: “I’ve been very impressed in Seoul, South Korea, to see people looking at streaming video on the Internet on their mobiles at 14 megabits a second.”
Vinton G. Cerf is vice president and chief Internet evangelist for Google. Widely known as one of the "Fathers of the Internet," Cerf is the co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols and the architecture of the Internet. He has received a number of awards and recognition for his work from several US presidents, including the Medal of Freedom, the highest award possible for civilians in the US.
