Gore gets award for inventing internet
Folks, I am not making this up. You might recall that Al Gore once said in a CNN interview that, “When I was in Congress, I took the lead in creating the Internet.” In reality, Gore was still a college student and a pot-smoking cub reporter at The Tennessean in Nashville when ARPA was giving the first grants to academic researchers to develop what became the Internet. Al Gore’s major contribution to the internet, other than jokes about him creating it and generating some interest in who actually created it, consisted of voting, as a Senator, to spend millions of dollars of other people’s money to pay for high-performance computers and networks, and of pushing legislation, as vice president, for a new telephone tax to raise $700 million to wire public schools to the Internet.
But that was all in the 1990s. Why is this relevant now? Because now, Gore is getting a Lifetime “Achievement” Award for creating the internet.
Like I said, I am not making this up. Gore is getting a “Webby Award.”
In part to “set the record straight,” they will give Gore a lifetime achievement award for three decades of contributions to the Internet, said Tiffany Shlain, the awards’ founder and chairwoman.
“It’s just one of those instances someone did amazing work for three decades as congressman, senator and vice president and it got spun around into this political mess,” Shlain said.
And, in one of the great ironies, and tributes to self-deception,
Vint Cerf, undisputedly one of the Internet’s key inventors, will give Gore the award at a June 6 ceremony in New York.
“He is indeed due some thanks and consideration for his early contributions,” Cerf said.
Excuse me, Dr. Cerf — and with all due respect to your role in creating the internet — what “contributions” did Gore make? It’s not like he donated the $700 million himself. He just voted to make us taxpayer “contribute” that.
Now I know internet access in the classroom is critical for curing our children of their excessively long attention spans, and I like high-performance computers and networks as much as anybody (but I’d like them better if I actually had them!), but it seems to me that while there is great merit in doing the work to invent these things, and also merit in paying for them, there is not a whole lot of sacrifice involved in voting to make other people pay for these things. If Al Gore had done some technical work on internet protocols — like Vinton Cerf did — he might be worthy of an award for it. If Al Gore had donated the money for a project as far-reaching as as the internet, he would surely merit recognition. (Maybe they could name a computer process for him — how about the “algorithm”? 
)
But all Al Gore did was vote to use American taxpayers’ money for the internet. And while that may be good or bad depending on your view of government, it is hardly an achievement worthy of recognition for “creating the Internet.” It’s like giving John Kennedy credit for “creating space travel” when all he did was add more taxpayer funding and a timetable to an existing government program.
More to the point, it’s like politicians who carry on about how compassionate they are because they voted to take money from you and give it to some (other?) poor person. It’s not “compassion” to take money from other people and give it to the poor. Compassion is when you give your own money to the poor, or spend your own time actually helping out. Not when you site in your taxpayer-funded office and vote to give taxpayer funds from other people (some of whom are poor themselves).
One might ask, why is Vint Cerf going along with this? Surely Dr. Cerf, who did a lot fo the actual work and even wrote a brief history of the Internet knows the difference. The answer is, Dr. Cerf is a longtime Democrat, who supported Gore for President in 2000, and this is a way of making a political statement. He is willing — as many people are — to overlook obvious facts to make his candidate look good, and perhaps to bask in the reflected glory of someone more famous than himself.
May 14th, 2005 at 6:44 pm
Gore’s contribution was being a leader in Congress, helping fund the transition from the Arpanet to the modern-day Internet.
As you point out, Gore never said he “invented the Internet,” but that didn’t stop a conservative smear campaign in 1999. To read the blow-by-blow, you can go to http://jabbs.blogspot.com/2005/04/washington-not-new-york-post-shows.html
As a result of his contributions, the actual scientists behind the moden-day Internet have openly given Gore credit. So have honest politicians. Even Newt Gincrich once admitted Gore’s contribution.
But once you smear someone, he becomes the butt of late-night jokes. It puts everything a politican says into question. Gore becomes a “liar,” or “exaggerator,” even for things he said that are true.
So yes, you can laugh it up about Gore. But he was being honest when he procalimed himself a leader in Congress on creating the modern-day Internet. He was light-years ahed of his colleagues on the issue, as many of them have stated in Gore’s defense.
May 17th, 2005 at 4:04 am
I think you missed my point. “Creating” is often used as a synonym for “inventing”; the fact that he used one word rather than they other doesn’t detract from the claim that he grossly exaggerated. Even if you say he ways “a leader in Congress on creating the modern-day Internet” it’s still wrong, because Crongress did not create the Internet. Neither did Gore “help[] fund the transition from the Arpanet to the modern-day Internet.” “Fund” means “provide the money.” Gore didn’t provide his money for the Internet — he “provided” other people’s money for it, which is not nearly the same thing.
I grant that Gore voted for funding of the Internet, proposd funding of the Internet, and even proposed that ridiculous tax on second phone lines to pay for the Internet, that still doesn’t mean he “took the initiative in creating the Internet” to use his words on your link.
Funding is not doing — especially not when the funds are coming from somebody else.
May 17th, 2005 at 10:11 am
Actually, you have the original quote wrong.
Gore told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer: “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.”
It was a completely forgettable quote, the sort of thing politicians say all the time. Gore wasn’t suggesting he was a scientist. He was suggesting that in Congress, he was an early supporter — and pushed for funding — that allowed the Arpanet to become the modern-day Internet. When Gore was pushing for funding, most of his colleagues had no knowledge of, or interest in, what we now know as the Internet.
The immediate media coverage of the interview, even by the conservative Washington Times, did not note the “Internet” quote. It was only after Reps. Armey and Sensenbrenner sent out press releases chiding Gore for exaggerating that the ball started rolling, and the late-night joke we now as “Gore claimed he ‘invented the Internet,’” got going. Soon, everyone was recasting the Gore quote — not just conservative pundits, but mainstream press — as an example of how Gore exaggerates or lies.
But clearly, his intent was to boast about how forward-looking he was, in his role as a member of Congress. He could have made the same statement about how he took the initiative for a progressive environmental policy, but no one would have suggested he invented alternative fuels just because he was among the original Congressman to push for funding that. While he was vice president, he pushed for cutting government waste — you may remember him on Letterman joking about $1,000 toilets — but even if he “took the initiative,” no one would accuse him of inventing a cost-efficent toilet, right?
I don’t mean to take this to the absurd, but if the guys who actually were behind the modern-day Internet praise Gore, as they have continually, and even responsible conservative leaders like Newt Gingrich say honestly that Gore was “light years” ahead of his colleagues, I think you have to give Gore’s articulation the benefit of the doubt. Rather than assume the conservative spin of Gore’s statement, take it at face value. He was boasting about pushing for funding that allowed for the Arpanet to become the Internet. And he’s factually correct to make that boast.
May 17th, 2005 at 12:30 pm
OK, we are clearly talking past each other here.
The original quote you say I have wrong was quite literally cut-and-pasted from the quota you give as a correction. Here is the quote from your comment — cut and pasted rather than retyped — with the quote I used in bold: “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.”
The quote I had was neither wrong, to taken out of context to anyone’s detriment.
Now, on to the substance:
Supporting government funding is not a creative act. Supporting government funding does not create anything. Neither is it an act of benevolence, since it means spending other people’s money , not one’s own.
The fact that, as you say, “the guys who actually were behind the modern-day Internet praise Gore” is wholly irrelevant. These guys mostly worked at universities and other such institutions and were dependent on government funding (due to the cock-eyed way research is organized in this country). As such, they were grateful to Gore for sending money their way. This is understandable, since he was the one sending the money — but it is not a credit to Gore’s beneficience, since the money he was sending was not his money; it was the taxpayers’.
As for Newt Gingrich saying Gore was “light years” ahead of his colleagues — well, I presume he didn’t mean that literally, or he’d be long gone by now. But if the claim is simply that Gore saw where the internet was going before others in Congress, I submit that that’s not much of an achievement. First, those in Congress are notoriously ill-informed on issues of technology, even issues of technology that directly affect legislation. In this respect they reflect the communities from which they are drawn. Except for Vernon Ehlers (R-MI, a physicist) and a few physicians (none of whom were in Congress in Gore’s day), they have had little contact with the research community. There expertise is in getting elected (and in some cases, getting rich), not in keeping track of new technology.
Second, I also realized the Internet was going to be a big deal back in 1988, when Gore was being lionized as the only presidential candidate who took a laptop on the campaign trail. Do I claim any special merit for this? No. And no one accords me any, or should. But the only difference between me and Gore is that as a Senator, he had the power to direct billions of dollars of other people’s money, and as a college student, I didn’t.
Notwithstanding our disagreement, I’ve added you to the blogroll.