In the early days, Cerf was a program manager for the United States Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funding various groups to develop TCP/IP technology. When the Internet began to transition to a commercial opportunity during the late 1980s,[citation needed] Cerf moved to MCI where he was instrumental in the development of the first commercial email system (MCI Mail) connected to the Internet.
Vinton Cerf was instrumental in the funding and formation of ICANN from the start. Cerf waited in the wings for a year before he stepped forward to join the ICANN Board. Eventually he became the Chairman of ICANN.
Cerf has worked for Google as its Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist since September 2005. In this function he has become well known for his predictions on how technology will affect future society, encompassing such areas as artificial intelligence, environmentalism, the advent of IPv6 and the transformation of the television industry and its delivery model.
Cerf also went to the same high school as Jon Postel and Steve Crocker; he wrote the former's obituary. Both were also instrumental in the creation of the Internet as we know it (see articles).
Since 2010, Cerf has served as a Commissioner for the Broadband Commission for Digital Development, a UN body which aims to make broadband internet technologies more widely available.
Cerf was born in New Haven, Connecticut, the son of Muriel (née Gray), a homemaker, and Vinton Thurston Cerf, an aerospace executive. Cerf's first job after obtaining his B.S. degree in Mathematics from Stanford University was at IBM, where he worked for less than two years as a systems engineer supporting QUIKTRAN. He left IBM to attend graduate school at UCLA where he earned his M.S. degree in 1970 and his Ph.D. degree in 1972. During his graduate student years, he studied under Professor Gerald Estrin, worked in Professor Leonard Kleinrock's data packet networking group that connected the first two nodes of the ARPANet, the predecessor to the Internet, and "contributed to a host-to-host protocol" for the ARPANet. While at UCLA, he also met Robert E. Kahn, who was working on the ARPANet hardware architecture. After receiving his doctorate, Cerf became an assistant professor at Stanford University from 1972–1976, where he conducted research on packet network interconnection protocols and co-designed the DoD TCP/IP protocol suite with Kahn.
Cerf then moved to DARPA in 1976, where he stayed until 1982.
As vice president of MCI Digital Information Services from 1982–1986, Cerf led the engineering of MCI Mail, the first commercial email service to be connected to the Internet. Cerf rejoined MCI during 1994 and served as Senior Vice President of Technology Strategy. In this role, he helped to guide corporate strategy development from a technical perspective. Previously, he served as MCI's senior vice president of Architecture and Technology, leading a team of architects and engineers to design advanced networking frameworks, including Internet-based solutions for delivering a combination of data, information, voice and video services for business and consumer use.
During 1997, Cerf joined the Board of Trustees of Gallaudet University, a university for the education of the deaf and hard-of-hearing. Cerf is hard of hearing.
Cerf joined the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in 1999, and served until the end of 2007.
Cerf is a member of the Bulgarian President Georgi Parvanov's IT Advisory Council, a group created by Presidential Decree on March 8, 2002. He is also a member of the Advisory Board of Eurasia Group, the political risk consultancy.
During February 2006, Cerf testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation's Hearing on “Network Neutrality”. Speaking as Google's Chief Internet Evangelist, Cerf blamed the anticompetitive intentions and practices of telecommunications conglomerates like Comcast and Verizon for the fact that nearly half of all consumers lack meaningful choice in broadband providers.Google made a bid in 2006 to offer free wireless broadband access throughout the city of San Francisco in conjunction with Internet service provider Earthlink, Inc.Vertically-integrated telecommunications incumbents like Comcast and Verizon opposed such efforts on the part of Silicon Valley firms like Google and Intel (which promotes the WiMax standard) as undermining their revenue in a form of "unfair competition" whereby cities would violate their commitments to offer local monopolies to telecommunications conglomerates. Google currently offers free wi-fi access in its hometown of Mountain View, California.
Cerf currently serves on the board of advisors of Scientists and Engineers for America, an organization focused on promoting sound science in American government. He also serves on the advisory council of CRDF Global.
Cerf is on the board of trustees of ARIN, the Regional Internet Registry (RIR) of IP addresses for United States, Canada, and part of the Caribbean.
Cerf is on the board of directors of StopBadware, a non-profit anti-malware organization that Google has supported since its inception as a project at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society.
Cerf is on the board of advisors of The Hyperwords Company Ltd of the UK, which works to make the web more usefully interactive and which has produced the free Firefox Add-On called 'Hyperwords'.
During 2008 Cerf chaired the IDNAbis working group of the IETF.
Cerf was a major contender to be designated the nation's first Chief Technology Officer by President Barack Obama.
Cerf is the co-chair of Campus Party Silicon Valley, the US edition of one of the largest technology festivals in the world, along with Al Gore and Tim Berners-Lee.
