Taipei, Oct. 22 (CNA) The Internet of the future will present as many opportunities as challenges, all of which will definitely go beyond anything he imagined in the 1970s, a U.S. Internet pioneer said in a keynote speech delivered during a conference in Taipei Monday.
In the future, one will be seeing a lot of Internet-enabled devices, one will be buying clothes for oneself in the virtual world with real world cash, and communicating with the Mars via Internet, said Vint Cerf, an American computer scientist regarded as one of the founding fathers of the Internet, in the speech titled "Tracking the Internet into the 21st Century".
At the same time, the vice president and chief Internet Evangelist of Google also told thousands of conference attendees that the development of the Internet faces enormous challenges, including intellectual rights, the semantic web -- also called Web 3.0 -- preserving interpretive programs, operating systems and hardware.
With the rapid development of communications technology, such as RFID (Radio-frequency identification), devices such as refrigerators, picture frames, telephones, automobiles and clothing will all be Internet-enabled and dramatically change one's life, he said. "You could get e-mail or SMS (Short message service) from your refrigerator, " he said.
The best aspect of the future Internet is that it will involve the exploration of a completely different mode of advertising in which "everything is decided by the users -- whether they want to watch [the advertisement], what they want to watch. They will not be forced to watch them," he said.
InterPlanet (IPN), the interplanetary Internet, is Cerf's latest project.