Geoff Huston: The Internet’s Past, Present, and Future

In this episode of This Week in NET, we sit down at Cloudflare’s Lisbon office in Portugal with one of the Internet’s original architects: Geoff Huston, Chief Scientist at APNIC (the Asia-Pacific Internet registry). From helping build Australia’s first Internet backbone to now shaping global conversations on resilience, routing security, and cryptography, Geoff shares a rare, unfiltered view of how the Internet grew, and where it’s struggling. We dive into the critical topics shaping the next decade: Internet resilience, RPKI, the evolution of DNS, QUIC, post-quantum cryptography, and the rise of AI-driven protocols like MCP. We also ask Geoff: if he could redesign the Internet today, what would he change? And what’s on his wishlist for the future? Plus, a rapid-fire round of questions about the power of sharing in the corporate world. Join us for a candid conversation with someone who has seen — and helped shape — the Internet as we know it, and who loves telling stories about how it all began — from silicon chips to the age of the Internet and AI. Mentioned blog posts (in the intro):

Forget IPs: using cryptography to verify bot and agent traffic QUIC restarts, slow problems: udpgrm to the rescue First-party tags in seconds: Cloudflare integrates Google tag gateway for advertisers