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Despite the multitudinous derisive references to the supposed quote that continue to be proffered even today, former U.S. vice president Al Gore never claimed that he invented the Internet, nor did he say anything that could reasonably be interpreted that way. The legend arose from critics and pundits who plucked a relatively credible statement Gore made during the course of an interview, altered its wording, and stripped it of context to make it seem a ridiculously self-serving falsehood. The Al Gore claimed he 'invented' the Internet put-downs were misleading distortions that originated with a campaign interview conducted by Wolf Blitzer on CNN's Late Edition program on 9 March 1999. (Gore, then the sitting Vice President, was seeking the 2000 Democratic presidential nomination.) When asked to describe what distinguished him from his challenger for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey, Gore replied (in part): During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system. In context, Gore's response (which employed the word created, not invented) was clear in meaning: the vice president was not claiming that he invented the Internet in the sense of having thought up, designed, or implemented it, but rather asserting that he was one of the visionaries responsible for helping to bring it into being by fostering its development in an economic and legislative sense. The claim that Gore was actually trying to take credit for the invention of the Internet was plainly just derisive political posturing that arose out of a close presidential campaign. If, for example, Dwight Eisenhower had said in the mid-1960s that he, while president, took the initiative in creating the Interstate Highway System, he would not have been the subject of dozens and dozens of editorials lampooning him for claiming he invented the concept of highways or implying that he personally went out and dug ditches across the country to help build the roadway. Everyone would have understood that Eisenhower meant he was a driving force behind the legislation that created the highway system, and this was the very same concept Al Gore was expressing about himself with interview remarks about the Internet. How justified Gore's statement that he took the initiative in creating the Internet might be can be a subject of debate, as statements about the creation or beginning of the Internet are difficult to evaluate because the Internet is not a homogeneous entity (rather, it's a collection of computers, networks, protocols, standards, and application programs), nor did it spring into being all at once. (The components that comprise the Internet were developed in various places at different times and are continually being modified, improved, and expanded.) But a spirited defense of Gore's statement penned by Internet pioneers Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf (the latter often referred to as the father of the Internet) in 2000 noted that Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development and that No other elected official, to our knowledge, has made a greater contribution [to the Internet] over a longer period of time: It is certainly true that Gore was popularizing the term information superhighway in the early 1990s (although he did not, as is often claimed by others, coin the phrase himself) when few people outside academia or the computer and defense industries had heard of the Internet, and he sponsored legislation that included efforts to establish a national computing plan, to help link universities and libraries via a shared network, and to open the Internet to commercial traffic. In May 2005, the organizers of the Webby Awards for online achievements honored Al Gore with a lifetime achievement award for three decades of contributions to the Internet. He is indeed due some thanks and consideration for his early contributions, said Vint Cerf.
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