85% of all video we watch is pre-recorded, so you can set your system to download it all the time. You're still going to need live television for certain things - like news, sporting events and emergencies - but increasingly it is going to be almost like the iPod, where you download content to look at later.
There was something amazingly enticing about programming.
Given that my title at Google is Chief Internet Evangelist, I feel like there is this great challenge before me because we have three billion users, and there are seven billion people in the world.
When I joined Google, they asked me what title I wanted. I said, 'What about archduke?' They said, 'Well, that didn't meet our nomenclature. Why don't you be our Chief Internet Evangelist?' This was in 2005.
What is special about VOIP is that it's just another thing you can do on the Internet, whereas it is the only thing - or nearly the only thing with the exception of the dial-up modem and fax - that you can do on the public switched telephone network.
I can't say I'm particularly happy about all the spam and the viruses and the equivalent that we see on the Net, but I think technology can deal with many of the problems that we're now seeing, whether it's filtering or whatever, and laws may help a lot.
The net's future is far from assured, and history offers much warning. Within a few decades of Gutenberg's creation, princes and priests moved to restrict the right to print books.
Like almost every major infrastructure, the Internet can be abused and its users harmed. We must, however, take great care that the cure for these ills does not do more harm than good. The benefits of the open and accessible Internet are nearly incalculable, and their loss would wreak significant social and economic damage.
You should know that I've been hearing-impaired, not quite since birth, but I've been wearing hearing aids since I was 13, so I'm very conscious of the difficulty of voice communication.
The immediacy of the mobile changes it from what we're accustomed to in the personal computing world to something that's instantaneous... What's interesting and powerful about the mobile environment is that it's connected to services on the Internet. This augments both platforms.
The Internet is a really big tent. In theory, it can support the full range of models, one of which is, 'Here's my information and I'm happy you can use it,' and the other one is, 'Here's the information and you can't have it unless you pay me for it,' and perhaps some things in-between. There is a full spectrum of models.
There is a project that's underway called the interplanetary Internet. It's in operation between Earth and Mars. It's operating on the International Space Station. It's part of the spacecraft that's in orbit around the Sun that's rendezvoused with two planets.
To be honest, I joined Facebook as an experiment. I accepted all invitations just to see how many people would ask to be 'friends' - it quickly overwhelmed my time to process even the invitations and requests, let alone to actually go there and do anything.
Their Internet usage is growing very rapidly, and even they can do the math: If everyone in China needed an IPv4 address - just one - this country would use up one third of the entire public IP address space.
Henry Kissinger once told me he was very concerned about the Internet's impact on people's ability to absorb information in a concentrated way, because we've become accustomed to looking up something, getting a snippet and being satisfied with that - as opposed to reading through and considering a weighty tome that goes into great depth.
The big deal about the Internet design was you could have an arbitrary large number of networks so that they would all work together.
Some people argue we should solve all the problems on Earth before going off the planet, but that's like telling Lewis and Clark to stay put until the rest of the East was settled. No way.
There is a high bar for something to be considered a human right. Loosely put, it must be among the things we as humans need in order to lead healthy, meaningful lives, like freedom from torture or freedom of conscience.
Yet in all those cases I finally steeled myself to seize the opportunity, and find a way to muddle through and eventually conclude that I had, in fact, chosen the right path, as risky as it seemed at the time.
There needs to be some regime that is overseeing access to broadband to make sure we have openess; otherwise, there is a risk it won't be open anymore. We spent quite a bit of time with Verizon policy people in addition to participating in a multilateral discussion with the Federal Communications Commission.
