 I'm very happy to be talking today to Robert Kahn. He is largely credited with Vint Cerf as one of the inventors of the internet and is currently president and CEO for the Corporation for National Research Initiatives in the state. This is a question you must be asked a million times, but did you ever envisage when you were first working on this project that the internet would become the thing that it is today? When we started, we were mainly concerned with how you take different packet switch nets, make them work together, and how to get the computers on those different nets to all be able to interoperate. So it was a research experiment, mainly done to see what the potential was for various technological options. We just succeeded well enough that it actually became adopted. It has been largely, its success has been largely dependent on other advances, like advances in processing power, the take up of personal computing in homes. They are very interrelated though, aren't they? Because people take up personal computers because you have this fantastic internet. It depends on your notion of what the internet is. I mean, if you think about it, the internet has been around for 40 years. How many technologies can you say that of? And it's dealt with scaling in the underlying technologies by a factor of about a million in some cases. How many technologies can you name that have done that? And the reason is that the internet was not about the things that it's interconnecting. It's not about the networks or the computers or the devices or the operating systems or even the applications. It's all about the means by which they can all work together. And so it's not that surprising to me that it's encompassed all of these advances over time and the ones that will occur in the future because it's not about the things at that level. It's all about how you make the things at that level work together. Do you think there are any technological issues in terms of the running of this infrastructure that concern you in the future, the more that it grows, the more that it's taken up onto mobile platforms? Are there any issues that you think, well, we're going to have to resolve this because we're going to run out of IP addresses or? Well, there's a steady move toward IPv6 addresses of which there are quite a lot. And even with IPv4, which people thought would run out more quickly, they lasted for almost 40 years. Of course, the main driver for it has been in the last 10 or 20. I think the technical challenges I'm concerned about are ones that don't admit of easy solutions. I mean, people have argued that maybe we ought to have a clean slate internet. Start over right from scratch. I don't believe you can do that with something that is as global as the internet. Somebody doesn't like society. They would never recommend, let's do clean slate society. What does that mean? I mean, there's no reasonable definition of that that would mean anybody's test of reasonableness. Just finally, the one marvelous thing about the internet is that it has been this fantastic platform for creativity and for innovation. Is there anything that you're involved in research initiatives? You will see ideas that are in the pipeline. Is there anything coming up in terms of internet use that you are really excited about? Well, there are a lot of things going on that are interesting. I think the biggest driver of evolution of the internet that catches people's attention is going to be serendipity. The things that you can't plan that aren't linear extensions of what came before. Things that I've been working on probably more seriously than anything else. And for many years now, it's been the question of how you manage information in the internet. How you get interoperability between different information systems going forward. And more generally, how you can both trust your information to the internet. You can feel confident that you can get it back without being corrupted. And how you can manage that over long periods of time. So it's a conservation exercise? You could think of it that way. That's great. Thank you very much. You are very welcome.