COMPTEL PLUS — Many people in the world access the Internet for the first time on a mobile device.
And it may be the only way they ever get on the Web, according to Vinton Cerf, Google’s vice president and chief Internet evangelist.
Cerf, who is recognized as one of the “Fathers of the Internet," spoke this week about some of the growth and challenges in the worldwide Internet market during the COMPTEL PLUS Spring 2011 Convention & Expo in Las Vegas.
Africa has the lowest Internet penetration (10.9 percent) in the world, Cerf said, citing statistics from Internet World Stats as of June 2010, yet the continent is still home to an estimated 200 million mobile phone users.
Across the globe, in North America, 77.4 percent of residents have Internet access. But Cerf pointed out that the number of Internet users (266.2 million) is just a fraction of the users in China (825.1 million). The opportunity for growth in Asia is extraordinary since Internet penetration on that continent is only 21.5 percent, according to Internet World Stats.
Cerf described a number of security problems on the Internet today, such as spam and viruses. But he indicated that Internet users could avoid some of the problems through better practices.
“A lot of the problems are not technical. They are behavioral," Cerf said, citing as an example the poor use of passwords that can be easily detected.
Cerf also highlighted the privacy problems that are widespread on the Internet, which “allows information to be shared very readily."
“We are not thoughtful enough about protecting information. To make matter worse, it’s so easy to gather information" and share it on the Web, Cerf said, citing as an example the pervasiveness of cameras that are capable of uploading pictures to the Internet.
Cerf noted there may be a need for new “social rules of order if we wish to have more privacy than we do have today."
Another challenge of the digital age is the ease in which digital material can be copies and distributed, said Cerf, who alluded to potential collaboration between engineers and lawyers “to talk about alternatives to conventional copyright law."
