Vint Cerf, a renowned co-founder of the Internet, delivered the opening remarks yesterday at the third Conference on Innovation Journalism.

Cerf, who currently serves as vice president and chief Internet evangelist for Google, co-designed the TCP/IP protocols of the Internet and played a key role in developing its architecture. For his work, Cerf — along with his partner Robert Kahn — received the U.S. National Medal of Technology from President Bill Clinton in 1997.

Cerf became interested in innovation journalism through his friend David Nordfors, the conference’s co-char, who he met through his involvement with the Internet Society Task Force (ISTF), which develops Internet standards and protocols.

Nordfors, co-chair of the conference, remarked in his introduction of Cerf yesterday, “It’s the first time a news professional won’t open the conference but it’s appropriate, with big changes affecting the news industry. Signals show that the tipping point is here.”

In an exclusive interview with The Daily, Cerf spoke about how journalism has changed with the advent of the Internet. In 1973, print journalism, radio and television were the principal forms of mass media, and all were “controlled by large organizations that gave only a few people an opportunity to speak through this megaphone,” he said.

Twenty years later, the Internet adopted the World Wide Web, and by the next decade “everybody knows how to casually express their opinion through weblogging,” Cerf said.

“We’re seeing a technological landscape which is very different from what it was when the Internet was first designed, transforming the opportunities for self-expression,” he said. “The consequence of that is that people interested in what’s going on in the world will have a larger choice of news to choose among than they have typically with the traditional media. The side effect of that is that there will grow up out of that people who are evaluating the various voices expressing themselves and so you’ll get a kind of value system that you get today with certain mastheads.

“This is a very fluid environment, and I don’t think we can foresee precisely how it evolves,” he added. “But whatever it is, the ground rules are different.”

Cerf also reflected on the current status of the Internet, which he said is not as secure as it should be.

“Some fundamental technical steps need to be taken to make the network more robust and resilient and able to defend itself against various forms of attack,” he said. “But setting that issue aside, the Net is still rapidly expanding its population of users, its speed and its convenience.

“The inexpensive cost of interfacing through the Internet means that more and more things are going to be online,” he added. “So there’ll be billions of devices, more than there are people, in the long run. I see this really interesting networked environment becoming more and more adaptive to our requirements.”

Cerf remarked that he never expected the Internet to develop into what it has become today.

“We knew that the technology was incredibly powerful, but the economics of it were anything but attractive at the time,” he said. “That’s why it was a research project sponsored by the Defense Department as opposed to a consumer product. But as the physics of everything unfolded, things got cheaper and cheaper, there was a strong learning curve, so now you have a billion people on the Net pouring information into it, pouring information out, interacting with each other in ways that no one could have predicted, including me.”

In addition to his work at Google, Cerf has also been working on the interplanetary extension of the Internet in a jet propulsion laboratory since 1998.

“More generally, I’m interested in trying to make the Internet more accessible to everybody,” he said.