Brian Carpenter, the new chair of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), said that today's Internet, while growing very rapidly only scratches the surface. In particular, he said that the number of people with access to the Internet is very low when compared to the world's entire population. "In a sense, we have hardly started in reaching the whole population," Carpenter said.

He also noted the growing popularity of services like voice and TV, commenting, "I think VoIP (Voice-over Internet Protocol, allowing phone calls to be made over the Web) is very important - it challenges all the old cost models of telecoms." He added, "Second, it challenges more deeply the business model that you have to be a service provider with a lot of infrastructure. With VoIP, you need very little infrastructure."

The IETF is a large open international community of network designers, operators, vendors, and researchers concerned with the evolution of the Internet architecture and the smooth operation of the Internet. It is open to any interested individual. The actual technical work of the IETF is done in its working groups, which are organized by topic into several key areas such as routing, transport, and security.

Before becoming the new chair of the IETF, Carpenter, a distinguished IBM engineer, spent 20 years at Cern, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics. While at Cern he helped pioneer advanced Internet applications during the early development of the Internet.

The Web's growth and evolution depend on standards and protocols, and ensuring the architecture works and talks to other standards is a crucial job of the IETF. The top priority is to ensure that the standards that make the Web work, are open and free for anyone to use and work with.

"We've seen some interesting effects over last few years," explains Carpenter. "The Web was growing at a fantastic rate at the end of the 90s. Then there was a bit of a glitch in 2000. We are now seeing a very clear phase of consolidation and renewed growth."

That renewed growth is also being buoyed by emerging economies, like China, which are showing fast uptake of broadband. The number of broadband subscribers using DSL doubled in a year to 13 million, according to figures released at the end of 2004.

"The challenges we face are about continuing to produce standards to allow for that growth rate," explained Carpenter, noting that one of his chief goals is to make sure that the Internet can scale up to meet increasing need. To this end he is working on a project that will replace IPv4, the existing addressing standing user to send packets of information used in processing many Internet commands. The new IPv6 standard will allow for billions more addresses on the Web.

"The actual number of addresses with IPv4 is limited to four billion IP addresses. That clearly is not enough when you have 10 billion people to serve, so there is technical solution, the new version of IP - IPv6. It has much larger address space possibilities with no practical limits," said Carpenter.