[00:00.00]From VOA Learning English,
[00:02.30]this is the Technology Report.
[00:05.48]Britain's Queen Elizabeth
[00:07.72]presented her first ever Prize for Engineering,
[00:11.26]doing a ceremony in late June at Buckingham Palace.
[00:15.64]Some hope the new award
[00:17.78]will become the engineering equivalent of
[00:20.52]the Nobel Prize for scientific achievement.
[00:24.15]The award includes a prize of one million British pounds,
[00:28.73]or about $1.5 million.
[00:32.68]It was presented to five men who invented the Internet
[00:37.10]and developed the ways one third of the world's population uses it.
[00:41.98]Americans Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf,
[00:46.11]and Frenchman Louis Pouzin invented the Internet's basic protocols.
[00:51.44]They shared the award with Britain's Tim Berners-Lee,
[00:55.42]who created the Worldwide Web and American Marc Andreesen,
[01:00.95]who invented the first web browsing software.
[01:05.18]The morning after they received the award,
[01:08.37]three of the winners spoke to hundreds of students from London schools.
[01:13.34]Robert Kahn said the Internet is so much a part of people's lives,
[01:18.98]they don't really think about it.
[01:21.42]"To me, it's all about the protocols for making things work together
[01:25.20]- to link together networks, computers, application programs
[01:29.34]- which a lot of people didn't think was a particularly good idea
[01:32.52]when we first started out on it.
[01:33.77]But it's turned out to be pretty impactful worldwide."
[01:37.30]Many of the students carry devices much more powerful
[01:40.29]than the computers the men used to develop the Internet.
[01:45.07]They were joined by students in Swaziland
[01:47.71]who took part in the event by way of the Internet.
[01:51.54]Vinton Cerf, partner with Robert Kahn
[01:55.13]in developing the TCP/IP protocol
[01:59.02]that makes Internet traffic possible.
[02:01.86]He is now a vice president of Google.
[02:05.24]"The significance is not the winning.
[02:07.38]The significance is the existence of the prize at all,
[02:10.32]especially with Her Majesty's name attached to it.
[02:13.00]It elevates engineering to the same level of visibility
[02:17.34]and recognition as the Nobel Prizes."
[02:18.98]Both men say their satisfaction comes from the wide use of the Internet
[02:24.31]and the fact that their basic technical architecture
[02:28.34]is still a main part of it.
[02:31.18]But they noted the privacy and security issues the Internet has created,
[02:37.32]these issues raised concern most recently with news
[02:42.29]about U.S. government surveillance programs designed to fight terrorism.
[02:47.28](Cerf:) "We are still in the middle of
[02:48.97]this rapid evolution of the Internet and its applications.
[02:53.40]And we are going to have to learn, as a society,
[02:55.64]which things are acceptable and which things are not,
[02:58.48]what we should prohibit,
[02:59.92]and what things we should punish people for doing."
[03:02.26](Kahn:) "Those are not tensions that are just easily resolved
[03:06.55]- check the box and proceed this way or that way.
[03:09.69]They require constant attention, especially in democratic societies."
[03:14.11]Robert Kahn says technologies have always had "plusses and minuses,"
[03:20.59]he says the Internet is no different.
[03:24.24]But he also says that even after 40 years,
[03:28.87]there is no foreseeable end to the demand
[03:32.70]for the technology that he and his co-winners developed.
[03:37.39]And that's the Technology Report from VOA Learning English.