I read more and more about the Silicon Valley brain drain flowing into Google, but this is an awesome acquisition to their team.

Vinton G. Cerf (born June 23, 1943 in New Haven, Connecticut) is commonly referred to as the "father of the Internet" , during his tenure from 1976 to 1982 with the United States Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Cerf played a key role leading the development of Internet and Internet-related data packet and security technologies, including co-designing the TCP/IP protocol.

He joined the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers or ICANN in 1999 and is currently serving a term until 2007.

In early 2005 it was announced that Cerf, along with Robert Kahn were named the ACM's 2004 Turing Award winners for their work on the design of Internet protocols - the Turing Awards are the nobel prize of computing.

"Vint Cerf is clearly one of the great technology leaders of our time," said Google CEO Eric Schmidt "His vision for technology helped create entire industries that have transformed many parts of our lives. We are honored to welcome him to Google."

Dude. What a coup...