How We Made the Internet

On March 9, 1999, U.S. Vice President Al Gore, made a statement during a campaign interview that, unbeknownst to him, would soon become the subject of somewhat humorous controversy. What followed were a bunch of newspaper articles, comic strips, and “memes” mocking the vice president, starting a new wave of political humor for his candidacy in the 2000 Presidential Election.

Ridiculous. Did Al Gore really just claim that he created the internet? Well, not exactly. What he had meant to say was that he was an integral part of putting forward legislation that made the internet so easily accessible and as powerful as it was in the 1990s. But because of his poor choice of words, naturally they were stripped of their context and even completely changed altogether. That answer wouldn’t be as interesting as telling everybody that Gore was bold enough to claim that he sat down, designed, and built the internet as a technology, all by himself. Gore’s lack of forethought with his remarks lead to an influx of embellishment and misinformation.

But what started off as mass media shenanigans ended up becoming a valid burning question: If Al Gore can’t take credit for creating the internet, then who can? Who Invented the Internet? Well, that’s a ridiculous question. I mean, obviously it’s Tim Burners Lee, the man who created the World Wide Web in 1989 and finally made it public in 1991. Clearly, he is the Founding Father of what we recognize today as the internet…right? Actually, no. There are so many things that we are taught in school as being “absolute truths”: Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, Ben Franklin discovered electricity, Thomas Edison invented the light bulb. But when it comes to a relatively recent technology like the internet, the answer is unclear. Who is our “guy” for the internet? Or “gal” even? As there are many women out there who could just as easily take the credit.

Deciding who is responsible for the internet has become a discussion of great debate. Depending on who you ask, the answer will be different but the reasons still just as valid. Perhaps the story behind who’s responsible is just as complicated as the invention itself, filled with so many moving parts that are only visible when seeing the big picture, and that includes a lot of US government intervention. If that’s the case, was Mr. Gore’s comment really that unreasonable? Could he unironically take credit for inventing the internet?

The reason why a question like this is so open-ended is because the internet itself is an open-ended technology. It wasn’t something that just appeared overnight. It was gradual and took literal generations to master. The internet is so complicated, that even we don’t fully understand it ourselves. We often use the terms “internet” and “world wide web” interchangeably, but they are very different things. In its simplest form, the “internet” is just a bunch of computers talking to each other, and the “World Wide Web” is the software we use to understand what those computers are saying. Now this may seem like some arbitrary distinction to make, I mean when someone says they “bought something on the internet,” we all know what they mean. But knowing the difference is crucial to understanding the internet and its history.


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