Conversation with Vinton Cerf: "Education in the digital world, challenges of today and tomorrow"

**SPEAKER_1** (0:03)
Welcome to the EnlightED Podcasts, the worldwide conference that focuses on the challenges of education in the new world. Driven by Fundación Telefónica, IE University and South Summit, it gathers leading experts in education, technology and innovation.
What are and will be the main challenges for education in the digital world? What do we face, and how might we respond to them? Vinton Cerf, considered one of the fathers of the internet and current chief internet evangelist at Google, provides valuable insights in this conversation with Diego Del Alcázar Benjumea, CEO of IE University.

**Diego Del Alcázar Benjumea** (0:53)
Welcome Vinton, welcome to EnlightED. It's a great pleasure having you here. I know that you hate this comparison, but everybody talk about you as Gutenberg of the new era. And well, I just wanted to thank you for being here. The world changed.
Many see you as relevant, or even more, as him, as the internet has changed the world. Democratization of the internet has allowed, for example, in this time, 3 billion students in the world have been able to continue studying online during the pandemic.
So how do you value your discovery?

**Vinton Cerf** (1:42)
Well, first of all, that's very kind for you to say this, but let me remind you that anything on this scale requires a lot of people to contribute to it. And so even in the very earliest stages, I had a colleague, Robert Cahn, and he and I worked very closely together on the design of the system. And it was motivated by the American Defense Department that wanted to figure out how to use computers for command and control. So this was not one of those, wake up in the morning with a grand vision as much as it was, figure out how to solve this engineering problem. So that's the first point. The second point is, again, that in order for this to happen, literally tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and by this time probably millions of people, have taken steps to make the Internet what it is. And perhaps most important, the World Wide Web, which is the way most people experience the Internet today, was not invented by me or Bob Kahn, but by Tim Berners-Lee in 1991, about 18 years after Bob and I started work on the Internet. The third point I want to make is that the 3 billion students that you mentioned may have benefited from being online, but I will say that the COVID-19 pandemic, forced the use of Internet for access to education, well beyond the capability of most systems to support this easily and conveniently. So it was, I would say, a very forced and rapid evolution towards remote education. There have been some very good examples, successful examples of this use of the Net. The most visible one is at Georgia Tech, which has a master's degree program in electrical engineering. Tens of thousands of people have taken the course. It costs about one-tenth of the course cost if you were a resident on the campus, partly because of the economy of scale.
But we still have a long ways to go to make these technologies useful for K through 12, kindergarten to secondary school. Which leads me to the fourth point, and that has to do with innovation in general.
It takes a lot of courage in order to innovate and to do things differently than they have been done for many years before. And for people like you and others who are exploring an innovative landscape, looking for different ways to do things that technology permits, sometimes requires an uphill battle with people who are accustomed to doing things the old way.
So I'm really happy to have this conversation with you about doing things differently.

**Diego Del Alcázar Benjumea** (4:50)
Thank you for that response. I'm actually going to be touching in many of those points that you mentioned. But before that, I would like to ask you a question also following the comparison that I understand that you don't like, but I want to follow the comparison for one thing because the printing press allowed people to print all kinds of things. Internet also allows falsehoods, lies and malice to spread. The difference probably is that the internet environment does it immediately and globally, so it can cause serious threats to, for example, democracy.
So how do we fight fake news? What does the father of the internet, and sorry again for the comparison, but how does the father of the internet propose to confront these threats?

**Vinton Cerf** (5:41)
Well, first of all, I do agree that the printed page and the internet have several things in common, not the least of which is that the page doesn't know what's printed on it. The internet doesn't know what's printed on it, and it was designed that way. It was deliberately a sort of a flat platform on which anyone could convey any digitized information at all. That was a design principle, which has led exactly to your point, which is we dropped the barrier of access to expression and with systems like Google's indexing of the World Wide Web, the discovery of information, both of which are very important. We want people to share information. We want people to discover information. The problem is that there's nothing in this technology that prevents us from sharing misinformation and disinformation and even harmful information like malware or ransomware or other kinds of things or denial of service attacks. The list is very long. Well, most governance systems are intended to protect citizens from harm.