The legendary Vint Cerf, Father of the Internet and Vice President / Chief Internet Evangelist for Google (http://Google.com) joins us to discuss how regulated online access affects your business and the strategies that will turn it into your advantage... Read the Transcript

Vint Cerf Father of the Internet / VP & Chief Internet Evangelist Google http://Google.com

Vinton G. Cerf is vice president and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google. Widely known as a "Father of the Internet," Vint is the co-designer with Robert Kahn of TCP/IP protocols and basic architecture of the Internet. During his tenure with the U.S. Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Vint played a key role leading the development of Internet and Internet-related data packet and security technologies. In 1997, President Clinton recognized their work with the U.S. National Medal of Technology. In 2005, Vint and Bob received the highest civilian honor bestowed in the U.S., the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Regulation of online access worldwide is increasing. It is an issue of freedom of reach...from you to your customer and from your potential partners to you. In this article, we explore how countries are regulating online access and how your organization can create competitive advantage within these markets. Reasons include blocking child pornography and other objectionable content. It is hard to argue with that; ask Australia. Beyond blocking such widely abhorred content, however, countries can take off down a slippery slope of banning anything and sometimes quite literally everything. The usual suspects among censoring countries are no surprise, but a few are worth mentioning.  As for China, Lara Farrar reported for CNN that among many other sites, “Google's video sharing portal, YouTube, and popular social networking sites Facebook and Twitter are blocked in China.” LinkedIn is not currently blocked. Within the United Arab Emirates, “All or most VoIP services are blocked.” Within Chile, “Many educational institutions  block the access to websites like YouTube, Fotolog, Flickr, Blogger, Rapidshare, Twitter and Facebook.” Orkut as entered into an agreement with Indian Law Enforcement to track down “defamatory content.” Morocco filters out access to Google Earth. Within Turkey, access to more than 6000 sites are banned including YouTube,  Wordpress.com, all wordpress.com subdomains, Dailymotion, Google Groups, GeoCities, CareerBuilder, ShoutCast and Blogspot, Google Docs, Google Translate, Google Books, Google Analytics, and Google Tools. Apparently Twitter is not banned, and is an outlet for the President of Turkey (@cbabdullahgul) who has voiced opposition to the recently banned utilities. In an article for Reuters.com, John Poirier reports that, “Google Inc is working with U.S. and European officials to build a case that would argue Internet censorship acts as a trade barrier.” Right or wrong, a global decision is on its way, and each country will have to take a largely political stand that will ultimately affect your business within their markets. To create competitive edge from the continually changing landscape of internet censorship worldwide, consider the following. Keep up with changing internet censorship standards in your global markets. Open internet is best for business but censored markets can still be fruitful. Do not let your business get caught up on internet blacklists in censored markets. Make it easy for your customers in internet-censored markets. Lastly, include internet censorship standards as part of your global and risk mitigation policy.