The Internet is set to become the basis for just about every form of communication, according to net pioneer Vint Cerf. He was asked by the BBC to describe important changes that are ahead for the Internet.

The next decade, he believes, will see the Net spread even further and start to become the basic communications infrastructure for almost anything. He belives that the Net will stop being a part of the telephone network. Instead the telephone network will become a part of the Net. We will see a fairly dramatic increase in services riding on top of basic internet infrastructure,with more and more layers of functionality showing up in the Net. One such could be Grid computing that virtualizes processing and storage resources and lets people use, or rent, the capacity they need for particular tasks.

According to Cerf, "If you have the ivory tower view that the Internet is good only if everything on it is good you are mistaken. The internet is a reflection of our society and that mirror is going to be reflecting what we see. If we do not like what we see in that mirror the problem is not to fix the mirror, we have to fix society."