• October 29, 2007

Internet pioneer Vint Cerf steps down this week after seven years as the chairman of the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers, the agency that oversees domain names and other addressing policies.

Cerf will stay on as a "chief Internet evangelist" at Google, a post he has held since 2005. He steps down from the ICANN role becuase of term limits.

As a professor at Stanford University in the 1970s, Cerf led a team that invented the protocols, known as TCP/IP, that now serve as the Internet's basic communications tools.

Known since as one of the Internet's founding fathers, Cerf continued working on Internet technology at the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and later developed MCI Mail, the Internet's first commercial e-mail service. In 1997, then-President Clinton presented Cerf and TCP/IP co-inventor Robert Kahn with the National Medal of Technology, and in 2005 President Bush gave the pair the Presidential Medal of Freedom.