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Google's Internet evangelist, responsible for the address shortage on today's Internet, is anxious for IPv6 improvements. Also: his views on U.N. regulation, censorship, bandwidth caps, and .google.

Vint Cerf, a father of the Internet and Google's chief Internet evangelist

"Predicting is hard, especially about the future," quips Vint Cerf -- and he should know.

That's because about 30 years ago, when the now-famous engineer was helping to design the technology that powers the Internet, Cerf decided just how many devices could connect to the network. His answer -- 2 to the 32nd power, or 4.3 billion -- looked awfully big at the time. A few decades later, we now know it's far short.

Accordingly, Google's chief Internet evangelist and one of the few people at the company who looks natural in a suit and tie, is eager for tomorrow's high-profile World IPv6 Launch. The event will usher in a vastly larger Internet as many major powers move permanently to the next-generation Internet Protocol version 6 technology. IPv6 is big enough to give a network address to 340 undecillion devices -- that's 2 to the 128th power, or 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 if you're keeping score.

The change actually began years ago: IPv6 was finished in 1996, IPv6 networks could be constructed since 1999, and any personal computer bought in the last few years can handle IPv6 if configured properly. But because IPv4 was spacious enough for a long time, moving to IPv6 was a potentially expensive hassle that didn't have much immediate payoff. It was only last year, when the pipeline of unused IPv4 addresses started emptying out, that a sense of real urgency gripped the computing industry.

The IPv6 transition will take years as Internet plumbing gradually is updated with the ability transfer packets of IPv6 data from point A to point B. That transfer uses technology that Cerf and colleague Bob Kahn invented in the 1970s. It's called TCP/IP, and it's what wires together the Net's nervous system.

When you download that cat photo from a server, it's the job of the Internet Protocol (IP) to deliver it, broken down into a collection of individual data packets, to your computer. Countless network devices in between examine the IP address of each packet to send them hop by hop toward to your machine so IP can reassembles them into the photo.

Closely paired is Transmission Control Protocol, which takes care of ensuring the packets are successfully delivered over this packet-switching network, requesting missing packets be retransmitted if necessary, and reassembling them into the proper order to reconstitute the original photo. Curious people can read the original paper, A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication (PDF), written before TCP and IP were split into separate technology layers.

Cerf is a somewhat unusual figure in today's Internet development realm. Hotshot young programmers are pushing the limits of Web programming and other novelties, but Cerf, born in 1943, has a much longer history watching the cutting edge advance. He witnessed the arrival of e-mail, e-commerce, and emoticons.

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Internet co-creator Vint Cerf welcomes IPv6 elbow room (Q&A)