Vinton Gray Cerf (; born June 23, 1943) is an American Internet pioneer and is recognized as one of "the fathers of the Internet", sharing this title with TCP/IP co-developer Robert Kahn. He has received honorary degrees and awards that include the National Medal of Technology, the Turing Award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Marconi Prize, and membership in the National Academy of Engineering.
Life and career
Vinton Gray Cerf was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on June 23, 1943, the son of Muriel (née Gray) and Vinton Thruston Cerf. His mother was born in Canada and was of British, Irish, and French Canadian descent. His paternal ancestors emigrated from Alsace–Lorraine to Kentucky. Cerf attended Van Nuys High School with Steve Crocker and Jon Postel. While in high school, Cerf worked at Rocketdyne on the Apollo program for six months and helped write statistical analysis software for the non-destructive tests of the F-1 engines. Cerf received a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics from Stanford University. After college, Cerf worked at IBM as a systems engineer supporting QUIKTRAN for two years. Cerf and his wife Sigrid both have hearing deficiencies; they met at a hearing aid agent's practice in the 1960s, leading him to advocate for accessibility. They had two sons, David and Bennett. He left IBM to attend graduate school at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he earned his M.S. degree in 1970 and his PhD in 1972. Cerf studied under Professor Gerald Estrin and worked in Professor Leonard Kleinrock's data packet networking group that connected the first two nodes of the ARPANET, the first node on the Internet, and "contributed to a host-to-host protocol" for the ARPANET. While at UCLA, Cerf met Bob Kahn, who was working on the ARPANET system architecture. Cerf chaired the International Network Working Group. He wrote the first TCP with Yogen Dalal and Carl Sunshine, called Specification of Internet Transmission Control Program (RFC 675), published in December 1974. Cerf worked as assistant professor at Stanford University from 1972 to 1976 where he conducted research on packet network interconnection protocols and co-designed the DoD TCP/IP protocol suite with Kahn.
From 1973 to 1982, Cerf worked at the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and funded various groups to develop TCP/IP, packet radio (PRNET), packet satellite (SATNET) and packet security technology. These efforts were rooted in the needs of the military. In the late 1980s, Cerf moved to MCI where he helped develop the first commercial email system (MCI Mail) to be connected to the Internet, in 1989. Cerf is active in a number of global humanitarian organizations. Cerf typically appears in a three-piece suit, a rarity in an industry known for its casual dress norms. As vice president of MCI Digital Information Services from 1982 to 1986, Cerf led the engineering of MCI Mail, which became the first commercial email service to be connected to the Internet in 1989. In 1986, he joined Bob Kahn at the Corporation for National Research Initiatives as its vice president, working with Kahn on Digital Libraries, Knowledge Robots, and gigabit speed networks. Since 1988 Cerf lobbied for the privatization of the internet. In 1992, he and Kahn, among others, founded the Internet Society (ISOC) to provide leadership in education, policy and standards related to the Internet. Cerf served as the first president of ISOC. Cerf rejoined MCI in 1994 and served as Senior Vice President of Technology Strategy. In this role, he helped to guide corporate strategy development from a technical perspective. Previously, he served as MCI's senior vice president of Architecture and Technology, leading a team of architects and engineers to design advanced networking frameworks, including Internet-based solutions for delivering a combination of data, information, voice and video services for business and consumer use. During 1997, Cerf joined the board of trustees of Gallaudet University, a university for the education of the deaf and hard-of-hearing. Cerf himself is hard of hearing. He has also served on the university's Board of Associates. Cerf, as leader of MCI's internet business, was criticized due to MCI's role in providing the IP addresses used by Send-Safe.com, a vendor of spamware that uses a botnet in order to send spam. MCI refused to terminate the spamware vendor. At the time, Spamhaus also listed MCI as the ISP with the most Spamhaus Block List listings. Cerf worked for Google as a vice president and Chief Internet Evangelist from October 2005 to July 2026. In this function he has become well known for his predictions on how technology will affect future society, encompassing such areas as artificial intelligence, environmentalism, the advent of IPv6 and the transformation of the television industry and its delivery model. Cerf has served as a commissioner for the Broadband Commission for Digital Development, a UN body which aims to make broadband internet technologies more widely available Cerf helped fund and establish ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. He joined the board in 1999 and served until November 2007. He was chairman from November 2000 to his departure from the board. Cerf was a member of Bulgarian President Georgi Parvanov's IT Advisory Council (from March 2002 to January 2012). He is also a member of the advisory board of Eurasia Group, the political risk consultancy. Cerf is also working on the Interplanetary Internet, together with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and other NASA laboratories. It will be a new standard to communicate from planet to planet, using radio/laser communications that are tolerant of signal degradations including variable delay and disruption caused, for example, by celestial motion. On February 7, 2006, Cerf testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation's hearing on net neutrality. Speaking as Google's Chief Internet Evangelist, Cerf noted that nearly half of all US consumers lacked meaningful choice in broadband providers and expressed concerns that without network neutrality government regulation, broadband providers would be able to use their dominance to limit options for consumers and charge companies like Google for their use of bandwidth.
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