Every day, internet gossip boards and glossy magazines are full of rumours about paternity. Leaving Prince Harry aside for a moment, the biggest paternity kerfuffle of recent times is actually NOT being disputed by any of the alleged fathers, but rather by bloggers, journalists and pundits around the world. Who is the “father of the internet”?

Well, Robert Kahn co-invented the Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol, which allow systems to send sizeable chunks of information to each other. This is absolutely central to the idea of a “web” of computers working together. First registered in 1974, the protocol is still used extensively on the internet today, for email, web browsing and FTP. Vint Cerf is now Google’s “Chief Internet Evangelist” and, along with Kahn, was responsible for TCP/IP. Both of these two are pretty strong candidates for the title “father of the internet”.

As an interesting sidenote, the IP system that we use at the moment only allows for 4.2 billion IP addresses. With the huge growth in the number of internet users, we are running out of IP addresses. Cerf is leading the charge to switch to a new Internet Protocol (IPv6) which should be commonly adopted in the next two years.

Before Kahn and Cerf, there was Paul Baran, who developed packet-switched networks. Packet Switching allows information to be sent in small chunks, without the need for a dedicated route to be predetermined (absoutely central to the internet we know today). The technology was applied to the US Military’s ARPANET, which is acknowledged as the precursor to the modern internet. Baran’s work laid the foundation for the TCP/IP protocols.

Being a UK SEO company, we have to mention Sir Tim Berners Lee. The World Wide Web that we are familiar with was largely shaped by his vision. The actual physical internet was in place long before Berners Lee applied the idea of hypertext transfer across the network, but the web that we know and use every day is his. Before Berners Lee, the internet had been used for the transfer of data from one computer to others, with none of the “cyberspace” we know today. His innovation lead to websites, URLs and HTML.

Are we missing anyone out? Almost certainly! This is a complicated paternity case indeed.