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• Author: Postrel, Virginia
• Position: Vice-President Al Gore's claim of creating the Internet - Editorial

Al Gore says he invented the Internet. What does he mean?

It was a gaffe worthy of Dan Quayle, but with Clinton-style grandiosity. In a March 10 interview with Wolf Blitzer of CNN, Al Gore bragged about his record. "During my service in the United States Congress," he said, "I took the initiative in creating the Internet."

Wow. Al not only writes turgid environmentalist tomes, he also writes computer code. He created the Internet. What a 21st-century guy!

By the next day, the ridicule was flying - mostly through Gore's supposed brainchild. Declan McCullagh broke the story in the online Wired News and his Politech e-mail news service, pointing out that Gore was just 21 years old when the Defense Department commissioned the original ARPANET in 1969. By the time Gore got to Congress in 1977, wrote McCullagh, "Email was flourishing. The culture of the Internet was starting to develop through the Jargon File and the SF-Lovers mailing list."

Republicans jumped to mock the veep. "If the Vice President created the Internet, then I created the Interstate highway system," said Dick Armey, the House majority leader. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, a notorious neatnik, claimed to have invented the paper clip. Lott's press release included his supposed early designs and a final version dated April Fool's Day, 1973.

But Al Gore was not lying to Blitzer. The vice president almost certainly believes that he "took the initiative in creating the Internet." His claim reflects a particular understanding of the world and of recent technological history. As such, it reveals more than mere grandiosity and spin.

To understand Gore's bizarre boast, you have to know a lot of details about the history of the Internet. It's not enough to say that ARPANET started in 1969. A self-contained network for Defense Department researchers would be of interest only to military historians and a few techno-geeks. The Internet grew beyond ARPANET because of two related developments.

First, the Internet community developed the underlying programs - the "protocols" known as TCP/IP - that allow wildly different computers to communicate with each other. This programming infrastructure was what let "the Internet" evolve to encompass a bunch of independent networks, both public and private. TCP/IP's creators wisely left those protocols very generic, enabling future innovators to build other structures, including those that made the World Wide Web possible, on top of them. ARPANET...