Al Gore Invented the Internet... or not

They say that if you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes "true" and that history is written by the winners. We have yet to see how that'll work out for this whole "Saddam Hussein was supporting bin Laden and had weapons of mass destruction that posed an immediate danger to the United States" bit. But it annoys me that it seems to have worked for one of the Republicans' lies of the 2000 campaign. Even liberals are repeating it (like in a recent cartoon by Ward Sutton, which lampooned Bush by camparing him to Gore). So are techies who damn well ought to know better what Gore actually did, and what he said about it. As a techie, a liberal, and most importantly a believer in truthfulness, this offends me.

For the record: Al Gore never claimed to have invented the Internet.

This claim was a deliberate misrepresentation of what Gore actually said. The lie was started by a conservative journalist and Bush partisan, and the factually-challenged wire services and entertainment media picked up on it. Wired magazine in particular was responsible for propagating the misquote and then "refuting" it with a series of counter-arguments, half of which didn't even contradict the supposed claim.

What Gore actually said was, "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet." And you know what? He did.

Back in the early 1980's, when most Americans' concept of "network" meant "ABC, CBS, or NBC", Gore was one of the first members of Congress to recognise the value of computer networking technology, and to push for further funding to develop it. He continued to do so as Senator, not just voting for it or following along and adding his name as co-sponsor to the bills to fund high-speed nationwide internetworking, but drafting the legislation himself. That's "taking the initiative".

Later as Vice President, Gore popularised the idea of the internet as an "information superhighway", a phrase which has since become annoying from overuse, but was pretty forward-looking in the 1990's. Considering that his father was partially responsible for the modern interstate highway system, you can understand why that metaphor appealed to him. He personally pushed to get federal agencies to set up web sites, including a demo of the then-new White House site with links to departments that weren't online yet, as a not-so-subtle prod to get them moving on developing their own sites.

It's true that the roots of the internet go back before Gore first ran for public office. But that's like pointing out that the telegraph is over a century old. People who know a little bit about the ancestry of the internet, who remember bang paths, shared "hosts" files, and backbone segments run over intermittent dial-up connections, like to show off this knowledge about just how old "the internet" really is. Heck, I get some pleasure from people's puzzled expressions when I tell them I've been using e-mail for over 20 years. But ARPAnet <> the Internet, certainly not the internet as we know it: an ubiquitous, publicly accessible infrastructure for recreation, commerce, and free expression. That's what Gore took the initiative to create.

Robert Kahn and Vint Cert are two of the geeks who really did invent much of the technology we now know as "the internet", most importantly, the transmission control protocol and the internet protocol (better known as TCP/IP) that serves as the foundation of it. They were privy to much of the behind-the-scenes bureaucracy that provided its funding, allowed its expansion into more academic research departments, which brought it within reach of students, and involving technology companies, which planted the seed for commercial use of this nascent internetwork. And they have stated that Gore's claim was... true.

You can accuse Gore of choosing his words poorly, and giving himself the greatest possible credit for being involved. Inserting the phrase "providing the legislative and financial support to enable" into his boast would have made it more difficult to twist his words around. But no one with a solid grasp of the English language and a little common sense could think that he was really claiming to have invented it in his spare time between floor debates and fundraisers as a Congressman.

It took malicious and incompetent journalists to fuck that up.