Editorials and Opinion Pieces

Al Gore, inter-nitwit

BY: Ron Nehring, special to the Washington Times
DATE: March 16, 1999
SECTION: PART A; COMMENTARY; OP-ED; Pg. A19
LENGTH: 868 words

Last week, Vice President Al Gore raised quite a few eyebrows when he told CNN's Wolf Blitzer that during his tenure in Congress, he took the initiative in creating the Internet.

In examining whether or not the vice president was telling the truth when he announced to the world that he is the 20th Century's Thomas Alva Edison, we need to start with definitions (this is, after all, the Clinton-Gore administration). Webster's dictionary defines "create" as "to bring into existence" and "Internet" as "an electronic communications network that connects computer networks and organizational computer facilities around the world."

So, did Mr. Gore bring into existence the very communications network that is today helping to propel the Dow toward 10,000? Not so fast. The earliest manifestation of the modern Internet went on-line as ARPAnet, a research network commissioned by the Department of Defense in 1969, the same year Mr. Gore graduated from Harvard with his degree (it was in government, not computer science). ARPAnet consisted of four network nodes located at UCLA, Stanford, the University of California Santa Barbara, and the University at Utah. The nodes were interconnected by 50 kilobit lines provided by AT&T.

The first plans for ARPAnet were laid out by Lawrence G. Roberts of MIT in 1966 in his paper, "Towards a Cooperative Network of Time-Shared Computers." Our illustrious vice president was 18.

While Mr. Gore was serving in the Army in 1971, Ray Tomlinson of Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc. invented an e-mail program capable of sending messages across a network. In 1972 Mr. Tomlinson modified the program for ARPAnet where it quickly became the norm. Mr. Tomlinson is the originator of using the "@" symbol in electronic mail addresses to denote the sender's or originator's network node. That same year, the first computer-to-computer chat took place over the ARPA network at a computer conference in Washington. Mr. Gore, in Vietnam at the time, did not attend the conference.

In 1974, Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn published, "A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection," which contained their design for a new protocol to handle network transmissions called TCP. In 1978, TCP was split into two protocols, called TCP and IP, which together are used to relay today's Internet traffic.

Perhaps the clearest sign that Mr. Gore did not invent the Internet came in 1979, when "emoticons" such as :) came into use as a means of injecting emotion back into the dry medium of e-mail.

During the 1970s and 1980s significant programming advancements and organizational techniques were developed, such as the Domain Name System (DNS), that allows for the now widely recognized .COM, .GOV, .ORG, AND .EDU Internet addresses. Other important developments of the 1980s that are easily recognizable by most Internet users today included the development of the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) and moderated newsgroups. While Mr. Gore was out being defeated by Michael Dukakis in his quest for the 1988 Democratic nomination for president, Jarkko Oikarinen was busy inventing Internet Relay Chat, which spawned today's much-talked about "chat rooms." The World Wide Web made its debut in 1991, developed by Tim Berners-Lee.

There's no evidence that Mr. Gore had a hand in any of the technological developments that have led to the modern Internet, and he certainly was not the "controlling legal authority" behind its development. This should come as no surprise, for while the Net was being pioneered by such computing luminaries as Vinton Cerf, Larry Roberts, Robert Kahn, Tim Berners-Lee and others, Mr. Gore was playing politics in Washington.

Outside of the fact that the vice president of the United States was committing technological plagiarism, does all of this really matter? Absolutely, for while Mr. Gore claims credit for the ascension of the Internet, he and his colleagues in the Democratic Party pursue policies that can only hamper its future development.

The Clinton-Gore administration has opposed the export of encryption technology necessary to keep on-line transactions secure; supported the Clipper chip as a means of giving the government a key to everyone's private electronic mail; imposed the illegal "Gore Tax" on telephone service, making it more expensive to add a second telephone line for Internet service; opposed cutting the capital gains tax, a clear inhibitor of the growth of high-tech companies; opposed immigration reforms to make more skilled workers available for growing companies; championed new taxes on Internet transactions; and sent the federal government's lawyers out to the West Coast to clamp down on some of the high-tech industry's most successful companies.

The political pundits are beginning to wonder when candidate Gore will begin to move away from President Clinton and define himself in his own right. As we watch him take credit for the work of others, and claim to support an industry while conspiring to attack it, Mr. Gore isn't distancing himself from his senior partner - he's becoming just like him.