I’m disappointed that the idyllic and utopian model of everyone being able to communicate with everyone else and do what they want to do will be — what is the right word? Inhibited is the wrong word, because it sounds too widespread — maybe variable is the best way of saying it. End-to-end connectivity will vary depending on location.

How has your original design weathered the test of time?

Everything has expanded by a factor of a million since we turned it on in 1973. The number of machines on the network, the speeds of the network, the kind of memory capacity that’s available, it’s all 10 to the sixth.

I would say that there aren’t too many systems that have been designed that can handle a millionfold scaling without completely collapsing. But that doesn’t mean that it will continue to work that way.

Is the I.T.U. and its effort to take over governance a threat to an open Internet?

People complained about my nasty comment. I said that these dinosaurs don’t know that they’re dead yet, because it takes so long for the signal to traverse their long necks to get to their pea-sized brains. Some people were insulted by that. I was pleased. It’s not at all clear to me that I.T.U.'s standards-making activities have kept up with need. The consequence of this is that they are less and less relevant.

Beyond the mobile Internet and the Internet of things, what else do you see on the horizon?

There are a couple of things. One of them is related to measurement and monitoring. It gives us the ability to see trends and to see things that we might not see if we under-sample. That, plus being able to see large aggregates of what we hope is sufficiently anonymized information, can help us reveal states that we might not otherwise see.

It is like being able to figure out flu trends. I think of it as a kind of sociological or a socioeconomic CT scan that is helping us to see the dynamics in the world in a way that we couldn’t otherwise see. And of course it leads to all kinds of worries about privacy and the like.