Vinton Gray Cerf is a futurist with a day job. He is, on the one hand, someone who thinks profound thoughts - and is considered by many to be "the father of the internet" for his work in developing and evolving the protocols that underpin the gigantic global network.

On the other hand, Dr Cerf is still the senior vice president for internet architecture and technology at Virginia-based WorldCom.

In short, he's a good person to talk to about the so-called "internet revolution" - and whether there is really anything remotely revolutionary about it any more. In conversation - and in comments he makes on his "Cerf's Up" website - Dr Cerf comes across as an affable academic with a quick mind and keen awareness of the potential that still lies untapped within the net.

"The internet is expanding at a rapid rate (as fast as 80-100 per cent per year in terms of users and computers on line) and it will bring new service features including support for voice, radio and television," predicts Dr Cerf.

Wireless access will become commonplace and many internet-enabled appliances and hand-held devices will emerge in the early years of the first decade, he says. "Ultimately, the internet will enjoy wider-spread deployment than television, radio and telephony. I estimate that there will be nearly 2.5bn devices on the internet by 2006 and by 2010 half the world's population will have access to the internet."

Yet his experiences in the higher echelons of the global computer and telecoms industry have also left Dr Cerf with a strong business sense. He has clear views on which of the many innovative ideas to come from the internet revolution actually have a chance of surviving as viable, long-term businesses.

As a result, Dr Cerf is not shy about naming what he sees as the failings of many dotcom businesses that did not survive the so-called stock market "tech wreck" of 2000.

"Their business models did not generate enough revenue and they were living on capital that ran out," he says. "They did not gain enough traction in the market, so the business plan simply proved overly optimistic. And along with insufficient revenue, they ran out of capital. There was no more capital available after April 2000 because venture capitalists concluded that not all internet initiatives were going to succeed."

He suggests that if the companies that died in the dotcom implosion had operated with "better business models, more conservative plans, and less dependence on easily available capital", they might have survived.

He also warns that disappointment with the dotcom experience of 2000 and 2001 should not be allowed to taint the future of the internet. "The internet is here to stay, if the regulators/ legislators of the world don't kill it," he says. "I am convinced that software companies and service companies will find the internet a highly attractive and effective medium in which to conduct e-commerce and provide a variety of services that would otherwise not be feasible."

The issue becomes even more interesting when Dr Cerf considers the future of an "essential service" for the internet that has yet to find a strongly successful business model: the search engine. "To the degree that the internet's content remains open, the public search engines are very powerful tools, but there is an open question about the financial side of things," he says.

What business model will support them, I ask.

He suggests that the existing business model for many search engines - advertising - may well have been a case of "the wrong model mapped onto the right tool". Search engine companies may find, for example, that they need to move to an economic model where they demonstrate the effectiveness of a given search technology in the public space and then get corporations to pay for licences to use that technology on their corporate networks or public websites. "That sounds like a more solid model than advertising," he says.

Dr Cerf also addressed the concern that school-age students might lose the ability to conduct conventional research in libraries if they become too used to merely typing a query into a search engine and spouting back the results in essays and school projects. Students who adopt this approach will soon bump up against the limits of the technology - and the need to develop conventional research skills.

"If people believe that they have searched the entire internet when they run a search on a search engine, they are sadly mistaken - they are only seeing a subset of what is available," he says. "You can't assume there is no more information because you can't find it."

Over the coming year, Dr Cerf predicts that there will continue to be strong growth in the amount of freely available information on the internet - alongside a strong growth in the implementation of subscription models for information provided on commercially-operated web sites.

"We are seeing people reassessing business models and moving to subscription models or those based on licensing," he says. Dr Cerf is also seeing increasing interest from governments in providing information and services via the internet - citing his own recent meetings with the president and vice president of Uruguay as evidence of this trend.

"The government of Uruguay is working hard to make lots of information available to citizens - internet access is now available to two-thirds of the population in Montevideo," he says. "I was impressed by how ambitious they were to make it available."