(FORTUNE Magazine) – Vinton G. Cerf Chief Internet Evangelist, Google

He has a goofy job title, but perhaps no executive working today is better suited to advocate all things online than Cerf, a founding father of the Net during his days at DARPA and MCI. One of his first ministries? Pushing "Net neutrality" legislation that would prevent broadband providers like phone and cable companies from prioritizing or limiting Internet traffic that flows across their networks. Cerf recently chatted with FORTUNE's Stephanie N. Mehta about digital books and interplanetary Internet connectivity.

You left the former MCI for Google last fall. Why? For 11 years [at MCI] I was basically working on the plumbing of the Internet. It occurred to me that I'd like to get back to the application space, and Google was absolutely the most innovative company in which to do that. I had known [Google CEO] Eric Schmidt for something like 25 years, so I just sent him an e-mail and said, "Do you want some help?" He said yes.

You're involved in Google's effort to digitize books. John Updike recently called books on the web "a grisly scenario." Why are people so exercised about this subject? The only people who are concerned about it, frankly, are publishers, most of whom have formed [other] business relationships to index their newly published works on the Internet. What we're trying to do is not put all the content up on the Net or online, but rather to index it so that people can discover whether or not there are books of interest to them. In order to index a book, of course, we have to scan it.

So what's the problem? The argument appears to be whether making an index is somehow a copyright violation. I'm still scratching my head over that one, but I'm just an engineer.

You're also pushing network neutrality, another controversial subject. Why? Open access to all parts of the Internet has been a fundamental element of innovation and development of new products and services. Some of the broadband providers are saying they don't like it that way--they don't want the consumer to get access to that content unless they get paid, not only by the consumer but by the service providers.

What solution would be fair to both broadband providers and consumers? In the U.K. and the Netherlands, regulators have said broadband service must be open, and there mustn't be any constraints on where consumers can go. If carriers wish to offer additional value-added services to consumers, they are free to do so. But they are not free to interfere with the consumer's access to anywhere in the world.

What else are you working on? I'm having a wonderful time at the NASA jet-propulsion lab designing and implementing an interplanetary backbone for the Internet in order to do a better job of supporting space exploration. That's fun.