FC: I created the "Al Gore created the Internet" story

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,39301,00.html

   The Mother of Gore's Invention
   by Declan McCullagh (declan () wired com)

   3:00 a.m. Oct. 17, 2000 PDT
   WASHINGTON -- If it's true that Al Gore created the Internet, then I
   created the "Al Gore created the Internet" story.

   I was the first reporter to question the vice president's improvident
   boast, way back when he made it in early 1999.

   Since then, the story's become far more than just a staple of
   late-night Letterman jokes: It's now as much a part of the American
   political firmament as the incident involving that other vice
   president, a schoolchild, and a very unfortunate spelling of potato.

   Poor Al. For a presidential wannabe who prides himself on a sober
   command of the brow-furrowing nuances of technology policy, being the
   butt of all these jokes has proven something of a setback.

   I mean, who can hear the veep talk up the future of the Internet
   nowadays without feeling an urge to stifle some disrespectful giggles?
   It would be like listening to Dan Quayle doing a
   please-take-me-seriously stump speech at an Idaho potato farm.

   Case in point: Mars Inc. lampoons the vice president in a hilarious
   new commercial for Snickers. In it, a cartoon Al brags that he,
   variously, invented the Internet, trousers, and when he wasn't busy
   elsewhere, "lots of other stuff too."

   When you're getting mocked by a candy company, you know your
   statesmanship rating has plummeted to a terrifying new low. No wonder
   one recent poll shows Gore to be solidly ahead of his Republican rival
   in only 11 states. It's simple: He's got no respect.

   Which brings us to an important question: Are the countless jibes at
   Al's expense truly justified? Did he really play a key part in the
   development of the Net?

   The short answer is that while even his supporters admit the vice
   president has an unfortunate tendency to exaggerate, the truth is that
   Gore never did claim to have "invented" the Internet.

   During a March 1999 CNN interview, while trying to differentiate
   himself from rival Bill Bradley, Gore boasted: "During my service in
   the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the
   Internet."

   That statement was enough to convince me, with the encouragement of my
   then-editor James Glave, to write a brief article that questioned the
   vice president's claim. Republicans on Capitol Hill noticed the Wired
   News writeup and started faxing around tongue-in-cheek press releases
   -- inveterate neatnik Trent Lott claimed to have invented the paper
   clip -- and other journalists picked up the story too.

   My article never used the word "invented," but it didn't take long for
   Gore's claim to morph into something he never intended.

   The terrible irony in this exchange is that while Gore certainly
   didn't create the Internet, he was one of the first politicians to
   realize that those bearded, bespectacled researchers were busy
   crafting something that could, just maybe, become pretty important.

   In January 1994, Gore gave a landmark speech at UCLA about the
   "information superhighway."

   Many portions -- discussions of universal service, wiring classrooms
   to the Net, and antitrust actions -- are surprisingly relevant even
   today. (That's an impressive enough feat that we might even forgive
   Gore his tortured metaphors such as "road kill on the information
   superhighway" and "parked at the curb" on the information
   superhighway.)

   Gore's speech reverberated around Democratic political circles in
   Washington. Other Clinton administration officials began citing it in
   their own remarks, and the combined effort helped to grab the media's
   attention.

   Their timing was impeccable: In July 1993, according to Network
   Wizards' survey, there were 1.8 million computers connected to the
   Internet. By July 1994, the figure had nearly doubled to 3.2 million,
   a trend that continued through January 2000, when about 72 million
   computers had permanent network addresses.

   Small wonder, then, that as the election nears, Gore's defenders have
   been rallying to defend him. In a recent op-ed piece in the San Jose
   Mercury News, John Doerr and Bill Joy claim "nobody in Washington
   understands" the new economy as well as Gore does.

   Net-pioneers Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf, a Democratic party donor, have
   written an essay saying "no other elected official, to our knowledge,
   has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time" than the
   veep.

   Scott Rosenberg, in a recent Salon article, joined the fray: "The
   'Gore claims he invented the Net' trope is so full of holes that it
   makes you wish there were product recalls for bad information."

   It's also true that, as a senator, Gore in the 1980s supported
   universities' efforts to increase funding for NSFNet, a measure that
   became law in the High Performance Computing Act of 1991. Gore's guest
   columns in Byte magazine at the time showed an appreciation of
   technology that was far from usual on Capitol Hill.

   But it's also difficult to argue with a straight face that the
   Internet we know today would not exist if Gore had decided to practice
   the piano instead of politics.

   By the time Gore took notice of the Net around 1987, the basics were
   already in place. The key protocol, TCP/IP, was written and the
   culture of the Net had blossomed through Usenet and mailing lists, as
   chronicled in Eric Raymond's Jargon File. At best, Gore's involvement
   merely hastened its development.

   Instead of the orderly interstate highway system that Gore had
   repeatedly used as metaphor, the spread of the Net has resembled
   something closer to a self-organizing, almost anarchic sprawl. Instead
   of a government/corporate-controlled system that might have looked
   like France's wretched Minitel system -- or, more charitably, a
   500-channel interactive TV network -- the Net's popularity grew
   because of far more mundane applications like email and downloading
   porn.

   And it's fair to say that other Gore pet projects, like the Clinton
   administration's abandoned Clipper chip, are hardly ways to protect
   privacy and security online and promote the development of this
   technology.

   Then again, it's also true the Clipper chip was first concocted under
   a George Bush Sr. administration, and another Bush occupying the Oval
   Office might well have similar inclinations.

   We know that George W. Bush may not be any tech-savvier than Gore --
   as anyone who caught the governor's the-Net-made-them-do-it comments
   about the Columbine High School killers can attest.

   But he seems to have successfully neutralized Gore's advantage on tech
   issues. In the first debate, Bush jabbed at Gore during a figure-rich
   discussion of HMO coverage. The delivery was wooden, but it was no
   joke: "Not only did (Gore) invent the Internet, but he invented the
   calculator," Bush said.

   The big surprise was not that Bush used the quip. It has, after all,
   also shown up in his stump speeches and Republican jibes.

   No, the surprise was that Gore remained silent. When he had a chance
   to respond, Gore only talked about prescription drugs: "You can go to
   the (Bush) website and look. If you make more than $25,000 a year, you
   don't get a penny of help under the Bush prescription drug proposal."

   At least he mentioned a website.

###




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