Vint Cerf

Vint Cerf, whose full name is Vinton Gray Cerf, was born on June 23, 1943, in New Haven, ConnecticutConnecticutConnecticut is a U.S. state in the New England region. Its capital is Hartford and its largest city is Bridgeport (2010 census). It entered the Union on January 9, 1788, as the 5th state, and had a population of 3,605,944 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry. The Lemelson-MITMassachusetts Institute of TechnologyThe Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. It received its charter from Massachusetts in 1861, admitted its first students in 1865 and moved from Boston to its present campus in 1916. As of October 2025 it had 11,816 students, and it counts 106 Nobel laureates among members of its community.Open the full entry Program’s profile names his parents as Vincent Thurston Cerf and Muriel Cerf.⁠[1][2]

In an interview published by Google in 2018, he said he was born six weeks premature and that he believes the oxygen-tent treatment he received caused nerve damage, after which his hearing declined by about 1 dB a year.⁠[3]

His family later moved to Los Angeles, CaliforniaCaliforniaCalifornia is a U.S. state on the Pacific coast; its capital is Sacramento and its largest city is Los Angeles. California was admitted to the Union on September 9, 1850, as the 31st state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 39,538,223, the largest of any state.Open the full entry; in a 1990 oral history he said, “I grew up in Los Angeles.”⁠[2][4]

Google’s technical biography states that he has worn hearing aids since the mid-1950s; in 2018 he said he began wearing two hearing aids at the age of 13 and that they were “pretty noticeable.” In a 2002 interview with AudiologyOnline he said he had worn hearing aids for “some 46 years.”⁠[5][3][6]

IEEE Spectrum’s 2023 profile states that his first job, at 14, was cleaning and refilling automatic coffee machines.⁠[7]

IEEE Spectrum states that in 1958, at 15, a family friend arranged for him to visit a SAGE radar-analysis computer center in Santa Monica, and that he later used a Bendix G-15 computer at UCLA with his high-school friend Steve Crocker.⁠[7]

He played the cello in his youth. In 2018 he recalled attending a master class led by Pablo Casals at BerkeleyUniversity of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) is a campus of the University of California system; the University of California was founded in 1868 through a merger of two institutions and moved to Berkeley, California, in 1873.Open the full entry in 1958, which inspired him, although computers captured his attention more; in The Washington PostThe Washington PostThe Washington Post is an American daily newspaper founded in Washington in 1877, known for its role in the Pentagon Papers case and the Watergate investigation. Run by the Meyer–Graham family for eighty years from 1933, it has been owned personally by Jeff Bezos since 2013.Open the full entry he had been quoted as saying “I traded in my cello for a keyboard,” said he regretted treating the two as a choice, and was considering returning to the instrument: “The cello is a magnificent instrument.”⁠[3]

The Lemelson-MIT profile states that he graduated from Van Nuys High School, as did the future scientists Jon Postel and Steve Crocker; he has described himself as a geek who wore sports coats, slacks and ties in high school: “If I was going to look different, I decided to do it with style!”⁠[2][3]

In 1961, at 17, he was paid to test software for Rocketdyne that analyzed tests of the F-1 rocket engine used in NASANASAThe National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is the U.S. federal agency responsible for the civilian space program, aeronautics research and space science. Established by law in 1958 and headquartered in Washington, D.C., it has run programs including Mercury, the Apollo Moon landings, the Space Shuttle, the International Space Station and Artemis.Open the full entry’s Moon-landing program.⁠[7][5]

He majored in mathematics at Stanford University and received a B.S. in 1965; Google’s technical biography states that he studied mathematics at Stanford on a scholarship; in the 1990 oral history he said he became deeply involved in computing as an undergraduate, chose to work before graduate school, and was advised by Stanford to do graduate work elsewhere.⁠[1][8][5]

He then worked for about two years as a systems engineer for IBMIBMIBM (International Business Machines Corporation) is an American information technology company, renamed in 1924 from the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (C-T-R).Open the full entry in Los Angeles, assigned to QUIKTRAN, a time-sharing system running on an IBM 7044; he recalled that the work sparked his interest in operating systems and made him realize he needed more theory.⁠[8][2][5]

While working for IBM in Los Angeles he met his future wife, Sigrid; the Lemelson-MIT profile states that they met at a hearing-aid agents’ practice, since both have hearing deficiencies.⁠[6][2]

He married Sigrid in 1966. Born with normal hearing, she lost it at the age of three after spinal meningitis and lip-read to function in a hearing world; The New Zealand Herald reports that her hearing deficit reached 100 decibels, that she grew up communicating mainly in writing, and that she learned spoken vocabulary partly by listening to hundreds of talking books.⁠[9][3][10]

In 1967 he entered graduate school at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Steve Crocker arranged for him to work with Crocker’s adviser, Gerald Estrin, who took him on as a research student on the DARPA-funded Snuper Computer project, which monitored an IBM 360/75; after that project was cancelled he and Crocker worked as research assistants under Leonard Kleinrock on the ARPANET.⁠[11][4][8]

Kleinrock’s proposal for a Network Measurement Center brought him into ARPANET measurement work: he wrote the software that drove traffic and captured network statistics, and with his UCLA colleagues helped develop the first ARPANET host protocols, at a time when Crocker was regarded as the head of the Network Working Group. He has been a member of the Association for Computing Machinery since 1967 and chaired its Los Angeles artificial-intelligence group, LA-SIGART, in 1968–1969.⁠[4][9]

He recalled that Bob Kahn came to UCLA from Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) around October 1969 to measure the behavior of the packet-switching network, and “that is how I met Bob Kahn.” Google’s technical biography places its entry on his ARPANET work at UCLA and his meeting Kahn under the year 1962.⁠[4][8][5]

He received an M.S. in computer science from UCLA in 1970.⁠[1][12]

He finished his dissertation at UCLA in March 1972 and received his Ph.D. in computer science that year.⁠[4][1][12]

In October 1972 he joined the computer science and electrical engineering faculty of Stanford University as an assistant professor, serving until 1976; his group there was funded by DARPA. From 1972 to 1976 he chaired the International Network Working Group, which was later affiliated with IFIP as IFIP 6.1.⁠[4][1][8][7][2]

In 1973 Kahn posed to him the problem of getting packet-radio hosts and ARPANET hosts to communicate, and he began design work before he had formal funding; in June 1973 he began working on the host-to-host protocol with Gerard Lelann and Bob Metcalfe, and he incorporated Louis Pouzin’s windowing ideas into the initial TCP design. He recalled in 1990: “Bob and I spent a lot of time working through various concepts and we wrote that paper in 1974.”⁠[4][8][5]

In May 1974, IEEE Transactions on Communications (vol. COM-22, no. 5) published “A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication,” written with Kahn (manuscript received November 5, 1973); the authors’ affiliations are given as the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering of Stanford University and the Information Processing Technology Office of the Advanced Research Projects Agency, U.S. Department of DefenseU.S. Department of DefenseThe U.S. Department of Defense is an executive department of the United States federal government, formed in 1949 from the National Military Establishment created in 1947 and headquartered at the Pentagon. The department’s website describes it as America’s oldest and largest government agency.Open the full entry. The abstract opens: “A protocol that supports the sharing of resources that exist in different packet switching networks is presented.”⁠[13]

The paper proposes gateways between networks that reformat packets into a standard internetwork format while each network’s internal operation stays unchanged; a Transmission Control Program (TCP) in each host that multiplexes and demultiplexes the segments of different processes; internetwork addresses made of an 8-bit network identifier and a 16-bit TCP identifier, with 16-bit ports; a sequence number for each byte of a stream by its position, which the receiver uses to reorder and reassemble data; fragmentation of packets by gateways to fit each network’s limits, with reassembly left to the destination host; and a window strategy with timeouts, retransmission and positive acknowledgments to handle losses and duplicates, with receivers able to adjust the window for flow control. The abstract also states that issues in routing, accounting and timeouts are exposed.⁠[13]

The paper thanks R. Metcalfe, R. Scantlebury, D. Walden and H. Zimmerman for comments during early discussions of international network protocols, D. Davies and L. Pouzin for comments on fragmentation and accounting, and S. Crocker for comments on the creation and destruction of associations. Google’s technical biography states that he and Kahn did not patent the technology, in order to reduce barriers to access.⁠[13][5]

A 2018 profile on Google’s blog carries a photograph whose caption states that in 1974 he demonstrated the ARPANET via satellite from Johannesburg, South Africa, to New York.⁠[14]

In December 1974 he, Yogen Dalal and Carl Sunshine issued RFC 675, “Specification of Internet Transmission Control Program,” which defines the functions of the internetwork TCP and its interface to user processes, including socket addressing, user commands such as OPEN, SEND, RECEIVE and CLOSE, the internetwork packet format, connection setup and teardown (including a three-way handshake) and flow control; it states: “This document describes the functions to be performed by the internetwork Transmission Control Program [TCP].” He recalled that a student of his, Karp (first name Richard), wrote the first TCP in BCPL on a PDP-11/20 at Stanford.⁠[15][8]

On a Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer podcast with Whitfield DiffieWhitfield DiffieWhitfield Diffie (born 1944) is an American cryptographer who, with Martin Hellman, published the paper “New Directions in Cryptography” in 1976, introducing the ideas of public-key cryptography and digital signatures and the method of key exchange later named after the two, Diffie–Hellman key exchange, for which they received the 2015 A.M. Turing Award; he was chief security officer of Sun Microsystems and has long advocated the right of individuals and businesses to use encryption.Open the full entry he said he was working with the NSA from around 1975 on using cryptography to encrypt packet communications, using DES rather than public-key cryptography; he said encryption was left out of TCP/IP at first because key management would have meant relying on the behavior of graduate students (“you'd have to rely on the behavior of graduate students”), and that “it was clear we could retrofit that into the architecture.” A 2013 interview on the blog of the first Heidelberg Laureate Forum states that he began working with the NSA on a secure internet in 1975; he called the way a publicly available secure internet missed its chance through bad timing “a sad story.”⁠[16][17]

In 1976 he left Stanford to become a program manager for networking projects at DARPA’s Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), where he stayed until 1982. He recalled that Crocker and Kahn both urged him to join; he declined the first time, around 1974 or 1975, and changed his mind a year later because teaching and administration had fragmented his time at Stanford, his wife’s willingness to move to Washington also helping; of the job’s visibility he said, “If you screw up, you will screw up in a very visible way.”⁠[4][9][12]

On the start date, James Pelkey’s interview materials state that he joined Kahn at IPTO in September 1976; in the 1990 oral history he said he joined “fairly late in 1976,” around October; the Lemelson-MIT profile gives his time at DARPA as 1973 to 1982.⁠[11][4][2]

At DARPA he managed the redesign of TCP into TCP/IP and was almost totally enmeshed in the packet-satellite, packet-radio, internetting and network-security projects, his main goal being reliable communication among hosts on multiple packet networks; he described the packet-satellite and packet-radio work as bringing data communications to military units in the field, and recounted deployments with the 18th Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg and the Strategic Air Command in Omaha.⁠[11][4]

He recalled a demonstration of the Internet in 1977: a vehicle carrying a packet radio drove along the Bayshore Freeway in the San Francisco Bay Area, and its traffic ran through a gateway into the ARPANET, across the packet-satellite network to London, across a dedicated satellite link from Norway and the packet-satellite network back to the ARPANET, and then down to USCUniversity of Southern CaliforniaThe University of Southern California (USC) is a private research university in Los Angeles, California, planned by a group led by Judge Robert Maclay Widney and opened to students in 1880.Open the full entry in Southern California.⁠[4]

In 1982 he left DARPA for MCI, as vice president of MCI Digital Information Services (1982–1986). He said in 1990 that he left because a DARPA salary could not cover his children’s college costs, and that a man who had recently joined MCI wanted an engineer to design and manage the construction of a “digital post office,” which became MCI Mail.⁠[9][4]

IEEE Spectrum states that in 1983 he led the development of MCI Mail, “the first commercial email service on the Internet”; Google’s technical biography states that the service was designed to connect to other commercial email services, Telex, fax and postal addresses, and that, having worn hearing aids for decades, he has often chosen to work for companies that invest in accessible non-auditory communication such as email. The Computer History Museum’s profile places his leadership of MCI Mail in the late 1980s.⁠[18][5][12]

On January 1, 1983, TCP/IP became operational, so that networks could be connected by a universal language; Google’s technical biography notes that the date is often called “the operational birthday of the Internet.” A 2018 event recap by the National Science & Technology Medals Foundation states that the technology was created in 1973 and launched in 1983 and that the original address space ran out in 2011, after almost 40 years.⁠[5][19]

He was a member of the Internet Architecture Board from 1985 to 1993 and its chairman from 1989 to 1991, and chaired SIGCOMM, the data-communications special interest group of the Association for Computing Machinery, from 1987 to 1991.⁠[9]

In 1986 he joined Kahn at the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI) in Reston as vice president, working on information infrastructure, digital libraries, knowledge robots and gigabit networking until 1994.⁠[9][18][2][5]

In 1989 he and Kahn facilitated the interconnection of MCI Mail to the Internet.⁠[5]

In 1992 he and Kahn founded the Internet Society; he was its founding president from 1992 to 1995, a trustee from 1992 to September 2000 and vice president for chapters in 1997–1998. For his chairmanship of the board, the Internet Hall of Fame biography gives 1999 in its text and 1998–1999 in its list of positions. From March 1999 to September 2000 he was founding chairman of the Internet Societal Task Force.⁠[18][9]

In 1994 he returned to MCI as a senior vice president, staying 11 years. The Internet Hall of Fame biography states that he served as MCI’s senior vice president of architecture and technology, leading a team of architects and engineers that designed advanced networking frameworks, and from 1994 to 2005 as senior vice president of technology strategy, helping to guide corporate strategy development from the technical perspective. In December 1994 People magazine named him one of its “25 Most Intriguing People” of the year.⁠[9][18]

In 1996 Sigrid received a cochlear implant in an operation costing US$34,000; Google’s article states that she received her first cochlear implant at the age of 53 and that it “functioned spectacularly well.” She described her first phone call with her husband after the operation as “the first intelligent telephone conversation in thirty years of married life.” She later took a call from an AT&TAT&TAT&T (AT&T Inc.) is a telecommunications company headquartered in Dallas, Texas. Its predecessor was SBC Communications, a regional holding company created in the 1984 breakup of the Bell System; SBC merged with the original AT&T Corp. in 2005 and adopted its name, and it has since operated a nationwide wireless network and fiber broadband, at one time also owning DIRECTV and WarnerMedia.Open the full entry salesperson and, asked whether she would switch to AT&T, replied that her husband was a senior vice president at MCI and thanked the caller. In 2002 he said she was an Advanced Bionics cochlear-implant patient who did very well with it; Google’s 2018 profile states that she uses two cochlear implants.⁠[10][3][6][14]

In December 1997 President Bill ClintonBill ClintonBill Clinton (born 1946) is an American politician and lawyer, a Democrat who served as attorney general and governor of Arkansas and as the 42nd president of the United States from 1993 to 2001.Open the full entry presented him and Kahn with the U.S. National Medal of Technology for, as the Internet Hall of Fame puts it, creating and sustaining development of Internet Protocols; the National Science & Technology Medals Foundation states that the medal recognized creating and implementing the Internet and sharing how others could tap into and grow the technology.⁠[9][14][19]

From 1997 to 2001 he served on the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC); he was a trustee of Gallaudet University from 1997 to 2005 and a member of its Board of Associates until 2017.⁠[9][6]

Since 1998 he has been a distinguished visiting scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and in that year he began the Interplanetary Internet effort; in April 1998 he received the Marconi Fellowship Award.⁠[9][7]

In November 1999 he joined the board of ICANNICANNICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) is a nonprofit public benefit corporation founded in California in 1998 and headquartered in Los Angeles. It coordinates the Internet’s unique identifiers worldwide, including the Domain Name System (DNS), IP addresses, and protocol parameters, and develops generic top-level domain policy through a multistakeholder model; in October 2016, the U.S. Government’s stewardship of the IANA functions passed to the global Internet community, and in 2026 ICANN opened the second application round of its New gTLD Program.Open the full entry, serving until 2007; from July 1999 he has been honorary chairman of the IPv6 Forum.⁠[12][20][9]

From 2000 to 2007 he was chairman of the board of ICANN. In April 2000 he received the Living Legend Medal of the Library of CongressLibrary of CongressThe Library of Congress is the library of the United States Congress. Founded in 1800 and housed on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., it answers reference requests from Congress, the public and other federal agencies.Open the full entry.⁠[9][1]

In February 2001 he, Kahn, Leonard Kleinrock and Larry Roberts shared the Charles Stark Draper Prize.⁠[9][5]

In October 2002 he received the Prince of Asturias Award for science and technology in Oviedo, Spain. When AudiologyOnline interviewed him in 2002, he was senior vice president for architecture and technology at WorldCom.⁠[9][1][6]

He and Kahn shared the 2004 A.M. Turing Award of the Association for Computing Machinery, presented in June 2005; the citation opens “For pioneering work on internetworking” and goes on to cite the design and implementation of TCP/IP and leadership in networking. They had earlier received the association’s Software System Award for TCP/IP, listed by the association’s site under 1991 and by the Internet Hall of Fame list under 1992.⁠[21][9][22]

In September 2005 Google announced that it had hired him, then 62; he started on October 3, 2005, as vice president and “chief Internet evangelist,” reporting to Google’s engineering chief Alan Eustace and working from an office in VirginiaVirginiaVirginia, officially the Commonwealth of Virginia, is a U.S. state whose capital is Richmond. It entered the Union on June 25, 1788, as the 10th state, and had a population of 8,631,393 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry so as to stay near his home; he remained chairman of ICANN and a visiting scientist at JPL. His chief of staff at MCI joined Google with him.⁠[23][24][9]

MCI’s US$8.5 billion sale to VerizonVerizonVerizon (Verizon Communications Inc.) is one of the largest telecommunications carriers in the United States, formed in 2000 through the merger of Bell Atlantic, one of the “Baby Bells,” and GTE. Headquartered in New York City, it operates a nationwide wireless network, Fios fiber broadband and communications services for businesses and government, and is listed on the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq.Open the full entry was then pending; he said the sale had not pushed him out, called Google his dream job, and said: “What's important at Google is what you are doing today and what you going to do tomorrow.” Google’s chief executive Eric SchmidtEric SchmidtEric Schmidt is a technologist, entrepreneur and philanthropist who was Google’s chief executive officer from 2001 to 2011 and later executive chairman of Alphabet; he chaired the U.S. National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence and has led the rocket company Relativity Space since 2025.Open the full entry said: “He is one of the most important people alive today.”⁠[23]

On the title, he recalled proposing “archduke,” after which Google’s founders countered with his present title; IEEE Spectrum states that it was Larry PageLarry PageLarry Page is a computer scientist and co-founder of Google who helped develop PageRank. He previously served as chief executive of Google and Alphabet and remains an Alphabet director.Open the full entry and Sergey Brin who rejected his suggestion.⁠[14][7]

On November 9, 2005, President George W. BushGeorge W. BushGeorge W. Bush (born 1946) is an American politician and Republican who worked in the energy business and was a part owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team before becoming the 46th governor of Texas in 1995 and serving as the 43rd president of the United States from 2001 to 2009.Open the full entry presented him and Kahn with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in the East Room of the White House. Bush said the two “figured out how to transmit data between separate computer networks” and that “By developing a common digital language for computers across networks, these two men prepared the way for a technological revolution.”⁠[25][9]

In May 2006 he and Kahn were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, and in 2006 he received the Order of St. Cyril and St. Methodius of Bulgaria. On September 30, 2006, he interviewed Kahn in McLean, Virginia, for Kahn’s oral history at the Computer History Museum.⁠[9][26]

In 2007 his service on the ICANN board ended. On November 7, 2007, Donald Nielson, a retired vice president of SRI International, recorded an oral history with him for the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, covering the design of TCP/IP, his DARPA and CNRI work, his work at MCI, ICANN and other Internet governance bodies, and his then role at Google. IEEE Spectrum states that he co-launched the Interspecies Internet in 2007.⁠[20][9][7]

On April 23, 2008, he and Kahn received the Japan Prize; that April he also became a member of the American Philosophical Society and a Freeman of the City of London.⁠[9]

Beginning in October 2008, NASA ran a month of tests of a deep-space communications network modeled on the Internet, with the EPOXI spacecraft, about 32 million km (20 million miles) from Earth, acting as a Mars data-relay orbiter and nine ground nodes at JPL simulating Mars landers and orbiters, sending dozens of images; it used Disruption-Tolerant Networking (DTN), in which nodes hold data until a path is available rather than assuming a continuous end-to-end connection as TCP/IP does. JPL’s release of November 18, 2008, states that he had partnered with NASA about ten years earlier to develop DTN.⁠[27]

In June 2010 he received a Lifetime Webby Award in New York City; in 2011 the Stanford School of Engineering named him one of its “Heroes,” and that year he received a lifetime achievement award from the Oxford Internet Institute, became a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society and joined the Cosmos Club.⁠[9]

In the January 4, 2012, edition of The New York TimesThe New York TimesThe New York Times is an American morning daily newspaper published in New York City. Founded in 1851, it is published by The New York Times Company.Open the full entry he published the op-ed “Internet Access Is Not a Human Right,” arguing that “technology is an enabler of rights, not a right itself.” He gave the example of the horse: “at one time if you didn’t have a horse it was hard to make a living,” “But the important right in that case was the right to make a living, not the right to a horse.”⁠[28][29]

In April 2012 he was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame of the Internet Society. In 2012 he was elected president of the Association for Computing Machinery, serving from 2012 to 2014 and as past president from 2014 to 2016; he served three times on the association’s council, became its awards co-chair after his term as past president, and received its Presidential Award in 2019.⁠[9][21]

President Barack ObamaBarack ObamaBarack Obama (born 1961) is an American politician and lawyer who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017, the first African American to hold the office. He was previously an Illinois state senator and a U.S. senator from Illinois, and he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009.Open the full entry appointed him to the National Science Board; the Internet Hall of Fame biography gives a six-year term beginning in May 2012, and the Folger Shakespeare Library’s profile gives his membership as 2013 to 2018.⁠[9][14][30]

On March 18, 2013, Lord Browne announced at the Royal Academy of Engineering in London that the first Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, worth £1 million, would be shared by him, Marc AndreessenMarc AndreessenMarc Andreessen is an American entrepreneur and venture capitalist, a co-founder and general partner of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). While in college he helped develop the graphical web browser Mosaic, then co-founded Netscape and Loudcloud (later renamed Opsware), and has long served as a director of Meta; he has also published essays such as “Why Software Is Eating the World.”Open the full entry, Tim Berners-Lee, Kahn and Louis Pouzin; the jury said the five made “seminal contributions to the revolution in communications which began in the 1970s.” At the presentation at Buckingham Palace in June 2013, he received the prize together with Berners-Lee, Kahn and Pouzin; Andreessen did not attend.⁠[31][32]

In an interview on the blog of the first Heidelberg Laureate Forum in September 2013, he named the information people themselves put online as the greatest current danger to privacy apart from surveillance and called Mark ZuckerbergMark ZuckerbergMark Zuckerberg is the founder of Facebook, Chairman and CEO of Meta, and a co-founder of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. His work spans social networking, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry “a young kid who has a different view of privacy than many of the rest of us”; he also made a networking joke: “What's the good thing about UDP jokes? It doesn't matter if you don't get them.” He lectured at the forum on “On Digital Preservation” in 2014 and on “An Interplanetary Internet” in 2017.⁠[17][22]

In December 2014 he was made an officer of the French Legion d’Honneur. In July 2014 he appeared on The Colbert Report.⁠[9][1]

Since 2015 he has been a member of the Board of Governors of the Folger Shakespeare Library; in November 2015 he received Colombia’s Murillo Toro Medal for communications.⁠[30][9]

In February 2015, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Jose, he warned that relying on digital storage for books, documents and photos could leave future historians without information, a possible “digital Dark Ages”; he proposed “digital vellum,” taking a snapshot when an item is stored of everything needed to reproduce it later on a future computer, and suggested printing important photographs. He said: “we are going to have to build the concept of preservation into the internet.”⁠[33][34]

Earlier, in October 2014 at the World Wide Web Consortium, he had said: “If we don't do something about preserving the meaning of the 'bits', we may become something of a dark century.”⁠[34]

In July 2016 he was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society; the Society’s page lists his subject areas as including computer engineering, communications and information theory, history of science and science policy.⁠[9][35]

On April 5, 2018, at an “An Evening With” event of the National Science & Technology Medals Foundation at Georgetown University, he spoke with Brian Fung of The Washington Post, recommended two-step verification and said: “I would be cautious about betting too heavily on blockchain.” Of the project to extend the Internet across the solar system, he said, “I won't be alive when all of this actually happens,” describing the work as “like being part of a science fiction story.”⁠[19]

In May 2018 he and Kahn received the Franklin Institute’s Franklin Medal; that year he was appointed to the Science Subcommittee of the NASA Advisory Council and reappointed to the Visiting Committee on Advanced Technology of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which he had chaired from 2006 to 2013; in November 2018 he gave the Romanes Lecture at Oxford UniversityUniversity of OxfordThe University of Oxford is a university in Oxford, England, where teaching existed in some form by 1096; it describes itself as the oldest university in the English-speaking world and is organised as a federal system of the university and dozens of self-governing colleges.Open the full entry.⁠[9][14]

Google’s blog profile of April 2018 states that he was then chairman of the board of the People Centered Internet and led the Digital Vellum effort to preserve the meaning of digital information for hundreds of years; he said “today only half the world's population is online” and that he was not allowed to retire because his job was only half done. He listed as unfinished work the Interplanetary Internet, the Inter-Species Internet, ethics and software, and Internet governance policy.⁠[14]

On August 4, 2018, the Voices of VR podcast published Kent Bye’s interview with him at the Decentralized Web Summit held by the Internet Archive in San Francisco. He said “I'm less worried about choke points, I think, than your question implies,” and that “we may actually be able to run a fully decentralized system and still rely upon it,” naming maintenance, upgrades and the cost of transforming data from one medium to another as the big issue. On cryptocurrencies he said, “I don't think cryptocurrencies guarantee an egalitarian distribution of wealth,” and “I would be very careful about putting too much weight on the current kind of cryptocurrencies that are around.” He also noted that cryptocurrency transfers are final, whereas many banking systems allow transfers to be reversed, which protects users.⁠[36]

In an interview Google published in October 2018 for Disability Awareness Month, he said accessibility had not been considered when the Internet protocols were developed but that he now sees it as a high priority, to be considered at the design stage: “There is no excuse for making products that are not accessible.” He said he does not feel held back by his hearing, though fast-talking comedians frustrate him; during on-stage Q&A he roams the stage with a microphone to get close enough to lip-read; he finds video conferencing difficult and hopes for real-time automatic captioning; email appealed to him because text replaced uncertain voice calls; his advice to his younger self was to be more matter-of-fact about his hearing loss; and Jack Chen, a Google lawyer who is blind, helped him become more comfortable discussing deafness.⁠[3]

In March 2020, aged 76, he announced on Twitter: “I tested positive for COVID-19 and am recovering,” urging people to listen to what John Oliver had to say about the national response. In May 2020 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, and in August 2020 he and Kahn were inducted into the Consumer Technology Association Hall of Fame.⁠[37][9]

On March 18, 2021, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists published side by side his and Martin HellmanMartin HellmanMartin Hellman (born 1945) is a cryptologist and professor emeritus of electrical engineering at Stanford University. In 1976 he and Whitfield Diffie published “New Directions in Cryptography,” which introduced public-key cryptography and digital signatures, and the two received the 2015 A.M. Turing Award for their contributions to modern cryptography; his later work has centered on the risk analysis of nuclear deterrence and on international security.Open the full entry’s pieces under the title “An existential discussion: What is the probability of nuclear war?” The two friends first discussed the question in a private phone call and then wrote separately: Hellman estimated the annual risk of full-scale nuclear war at about 1 percent (roughly 0.3 to 3 percent), while he argued that the danger can be grasped without numerical estimates, through qualitative reasoning and historical near-misses, writing that “any positive risk of a global nuclear exchange is simply unacceptable”; both held nuclear deterrence to be untenable as a long-term strategy and risk-reduction measures to be urgent.⁠[38]

In December 2022 he received the VinFuture Grand Prize.⁠[9][7]

He received the 2023 IEEE Medal of Honor, sponsored by the IEEE Foundation, “for co-creating the Internet architecture and providing sustained leadership in its phenomenal growth in becoming society’s critical infrastructure”; that year he also received the Marconi Society Lifetime Achievement Award. He is an IEEE Life Fellow.⁠[18][9]

IEEE Spectrum’s profile of April 2023 states that he holds two patents, that his heroes are Kahn, Steve Crocker and Gerald Estrin, and that his motto is “Patience and persistence count”; of the still-expanding Internet he said, “It doesn't get boring, ever,” and he named the biggest surprise of his career as “The explosive use of the Internet.”⁠[7]

TechCrunchTechCrunchTechCrunch is an American technology news outlet founded in 2005 by Michael Arrington and Keith Teare and headquartered in San Francisco; it mainly covers technology companies, startups, and venture capital, and hosts events such as TechCrunch Disrupt. Its ownership passed successively through AOL, Verizon, and Yahoo, and in 2025 Regent announced its acquisition.Open the full entry wrote on June 30, 2026 that he, aged 83 and vice president and chief internet evangelist at Google since 2005, spoke via video feed at the Open Frontier conference hosted by the Laude Institute, where Dave PattersonDavid PattersonDavid Patterson is an American computer scientist and UC Berkeley professor emeritus who led research projects including RISC and RAID, co-wrote a classic computer architecture textbook with John Hennessy, and shared the 2017 ACM Turing Award with him.Open the full entry, the UC Berkeley professor introducing him, said “he is retiring a week from today”; a Google spokesperson confirmed that he would be stepping down from his role at the company. CircleID wrote on July 1, 2026 that he would retire from Google the following week after more than 20 years as the company’s chief internet evangelist.⁠[39][40]

In an interview published by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on September 9, 2026, he said “your stuff on the World Wide Web is being copied verbatim billions of times a day,” framed compensation for creators as a matter of incentives rather than copyright violation while adding “But I don't think that there is a conclusion yet,” said of AI agents that “you want an audit trail available for what your agent did,” raised whether agents need to be registered so that a party takes responsibility, calling it “an area of unsettled law,” and said of large language models: “Even when they lie, they sound convincing.”⁠[41]

As of November 2026, the Royal Society’s page describes him as CEO of Tolero Networks, which is developing the software needed for the routers of an Interplanetary Internet; it states that he formerly served as Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist, contributing to global policy development, and that he sits on the US National Science Board and is a Visiting Scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.⁠[35]

He and his wife, Sigrid, have two sons, David and Bennett. His interests include fine wine, gourmet cooking and science fiction, his favourite being Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series; he also enjoys biographies, history and small dinner gatherings, and in 2018 he mentioned wine tasting in Lyon, France.⁠[9][2][14]

He is known for wearing three-piece suits, “Mostly because I think it looks good,” and describes himself thus: “I'm just a 19th-century guy living in a 21st-century world.” He admires Alexander Graham Bell, partly because Bell’s wife was deaf, as is his own.⁠[14]

He was a technical adviser to the television series Gene RoddenberryGene RoddenberryGene Roddenberry (1921–1991), born Eugene Wesley Roddenberry, was an American television writer and producer who created Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation. His space-exploration stories explored cooperation, diversity and humanity’s future.Open the full entry’s Earth: Final Conflict and has appeared on television programs including NextWave with Leonard Nimoy and World Business Review.⁠[9]

While in Auckland, New Zealand, to speak at the Knowledge Wave conference, he spoke of his fascination with the computer–brain connection that implants represent and said, “Like it or not the population of implantees is going to go up.”⁠[10]

He is a Fellow of the IEEE (1988 in the Internet Hall of Fame list; IEEE Spectrum calls him an IEEE Life Fellow), of the Association for Computing Machinery (1994 on the association’s site, 1993 in the Internet Hall of Fame list) and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a member of the National Academy of Engineering (from 1995) and the National Academy of Sciences, a fellow or member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Computer History Museum (2000 Fellow, “For his contributions to the creation and growth of the Internet”) and the Hasso Plattner Institute, and a Foreign Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences (March 2009). The Internet Hall of Fame list also names him a Fellow of the International Engineering Consortium (June 1999) and an Honorary Freeman of the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists (2012) and of the Worshipful Company of Stationers & Newspaper Makers (October 2015).⁠[9][21][18][12]

Other awards listed by the Internet Hall of Fame include the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award (1993), the Silver Medal of the International Telecommunication Union (1995), the SIGCOMM Award of the Association for Computing Machinery (1996), the IEEE Alexander Graham Bell award (1997, with Kahn), the medal of the Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf (June 1998), the George R. Stibitz Computer Award (1999, with Kahn), the National Medal of Science of Tunisia (2003), Dickinson College’s Joseph Priestley Award (2007), Estonia’s Terra Mariana Medal (May 2014), the National Cyber Security Hall of Fame (August 2014), the Catalunya International Prize (March 2019) and the George C. Marshall Innovation Award (March 2019).⁠[9]

The Folger Shakespeare Library’s profile states that he holds 29 honorary degrees and the Royal Society’s page gives 25; the institutions listed by the Internet Hall of Fame include the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Yale UniversityYale UniversityYale University is a research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Its predecessor, the Collegiate School, received a charter in 1701. Trustees chose New Haven in 1716; the institution became Yale College in 1718 and Yale University in 1887. Yale provides undergraduate, graduate and professional education and has 14 undergraduate residential colleges. As of October 2026, its president was Maurie McInnis, who took office in July 2024. In 2026, Yale expanded aid for incoming undergraduates and celebrated its 325th anniversary.Open the full entry, McGill UniversityMcGill UniversityMcGill University is a public university in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where English is the language of instruction. It was founded with a bequest from the Montreal merchant James McGill and received a royal charter from King George IV in 1821. Its faculty of medicine, established in 1829, was the first in Canada, and the university had 40,531 students in fall 2025.Open the full entry, Gallaudet University, Tsinghua University, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Keio University, the University of St Andrews, the University of Pisa, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and George Mason University.⁠[30][9][35]

In the first episode of the podcast Legends of Tech, hosted by Boris Feldman, a partner at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, he spoke with Whitfield Diffie. Referring to the 1976 paper by Diffie and Martin Hellman, he said it was clear then that it “was going to have a significant role to play in security systems”; when Diffie described being sent to Hellman, he said “I didn't know about that connection.” He said Google had pushed for HTTPS, DNSSEC and full encryption in its data centers: “cryptography is our friend here.”⁠[16]

In the same episode he discussed artificial intelligence, saying “I think the large language models are just the beginning of a much more elaborate kind of intelligence,” “we don't know when they are misbehaving,” and “We need new indicators that tell us whether we should trust stuff.” He said calling for a moratorium “doesn't do much good,” favouring constraints built in by technologists, with the Asilomar conference as a precedent.⁠[16]

Nodes of the BitcoinBitcoinBitcoin (common symbol BTC) is an open peer-to-peer electronic cash protocol, network, and native digital asset. Full nodes independently verify transactions and blocks according to the consensus rules; transactions are recorded as UTXOs, and blocks are organized into a public ledger through proof of work. Bitcoin is not issued or managed by any single institution, but using, holding in custody, and trading it still involve key, privacy, market, and legal risks.Open the full entry network communicate over TCP, the protocol he designed with Kahn: the Bitcoin developer reference states, “All peer-to-peer communication occurs entirely over TCP.” It also states that node-address messages carry IPv6 addresses, that IPv4 addresses can be given as IPv4-mapped IPv6 addresses, and that the default mainnet port is 8333.⁠[42][13]

Internet Society: Official website: https://www.internetsociety.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[43]

Association for Computing Machinery: Official website: https://www.acm.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[21]

Folger Shakespeare Library: Official website: https://www.folger.edu/ (opens in a new window).⁠[30]