BOB KAHN

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.

You can't gaze in the crystal ball and see the future. What the Internet is going to be in the future is what society makes it.

In terms of dangers, such as viruses, fraud or identity theft, I don't think we were thinking about that at all when we got started. If we had been worried about that, the net might have been better today, but we might not have even got there.

New capabilities emerge just by virtue of having smart people with access to state-of-the-art technology.

I think we're just going to have to live with the microcosm in the electronic world of the kind of things that we might see in the physical world.

For computer communications, computers talk in little bursts. They're not continuous like speech.

I believe in the not-too-distant future, people are going to learn to trust their information to the Net more than they now do, and be able to essentially manage very large amounts and perhaps their whole lifetime of information in the Net with the notion that they can access it securely and privately for as long as they want, and that it will persist over all the evolution and technical changes.

You can't gaze in the crystal ball and see the future. What the Internet is going to be in the future is what society makes it.

For computer communications, computers talk in little bursts. They're not continuous like speech.

In terms of dangers, such as viruses, fraud or identity theft, I don't think we were thinking about that at all when we got started. If we had been worried about that, the net might have been better today, but we might not have even got there.

New capabilities emerge just by virtue of having smart people with access to state-of-the-art technology.

I think we're just going to have to live with the microcosm in the electronic world of the kind of things that we might see in the physical world.

I believe in the not-too-distant future, people are going to learn to trust their information to the Net more than they now do, and be able to essentially manage very large amounts and perhaps their whole lifetime of information in the Net with the notion that they can access it securely and privately for as long as they want, and that it will persist over all the evolution and technical changes.

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.