Google's social networking site has come in for criticism and even litigation in India, after some users ran campaigns against India and revered Indian historical figures.

Similarly, spam is a side-effect of free e-mail service, said Cerf who is also chairman of the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which is responsible for the global coordination of the Internet's system of unique identifiers.

A key benefit of the IP packet layer is that it isolates the application from the underlying communications medium, which can be wireless and wireline, Cerf said. In earlier technologies such as television and telephony, the physical infrastructure and the application were tightly connected, he added.
The Internet packet does not care how it is being carried, whether it is by an optical fiber connection or a radio connection, and does not know or care what it is carrying.

One result of this architecture is that the next wave of growth in the Internet is likely to come from mobile applications. The mobile phone has become an important factor in the Internet revolution. There are 2.5 billion mobile users worldwide and the numbers are expected to increase rapidly in developing countries such as India and China.

The architecture of the Internet also ensures that the intelligence is at the edge of the system. This allows people to run applications on the edge of the Internet without having to take permission from Internet service providers. This feature of the Internet has stimulated tremendous creativity, and led to the founding of Internet companies like Google and Yahoo, he added. It has become all the more relevant as people move from using the Internet as an information resource to becoming producers on the Internet, Cerf said.