Wikipedia Al Gore and Information Technology: Disagreements | Network, Not Protocol

Wikipedia’s article Al Gore and information technology says that Al Gore “promoted legislation that funded an expansion of the ARPANET, allowing greater public access”, and prints the words of Vinton Cerf that the initiatives of Al Gore “led directly to the commercialization of the Internet”, while the ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990, the Act that Al Gore introduced was approved on December 9, 1991 for a network whose access it gives to “researchers, educators, and students”, and PSINet, AlterNet and CERFnet had opened the Internet at the Commercial Internet Exchange on March 25, 1991.

Preamble: I examine the Wikipedia article Al Gore and information technology, line by line, against the Act that Al Gore introduced, Public Law 102-194, read in full in the text of the Statutes at Large, against the statement “Al Gore and the Internet” of September 29, 2000 by Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf, which the article quotes, against the release of the Commercial Internet Exchange of March 25, 1991, and against the Governing Definitions of marknichols.com. Exhibit A at section 11.0 reproduces the article line by line, numbered and anchored, and every finding on this page cites those line numbers. This page is Disagreement 97 in the standing index of the series, Disagreements of Published Claims | Network, Not Protocol, and a finding on this page is cited by that number followed by the finding's locus, as Disagreement 97, 1.1.

Opinion Rules: You are visiting my record, and I am the subject matter expert on it. If you are a subject matter expert too, I want to hear from you: bring your document and I will answer it on the record. If you are not, you are welcome here to read and to learn. The documented-challenge terms of marknichols.com and the condition on opinion are stated at F40 of The Governing Definitions and Controlling Facts of Telecommunications Internetworking, and they govern this page.

Conditional on the Governing Definitions: Every finding on this page is conditional on the Governing Definitions D1 through D13 of marknichols.com, which are reproduced in full in the Definitions Addendum at the bottom of this page.

0.0 This section records the article this page examines, the documents it is read against, and the definitions on which the findings depend.

0.1 The source examined on this page is the article Al Gore and information technology of the English Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_technology. Mark Nichols supplied the text of the article as it read on November 14, 2026, and this page read the supplied text in full on November 14, 2026 and did not compare it with the live page. The supplied text does not carry the number of its revision, and the revision number is unknown on this page. The article names no author, and its authors are the editors of Wikipedia, whose names are unknown on this page. The supplied text ends at the heading “Selected publications” and carries no list of references, so the documents behind the article's numbered citations, among them the words of Leonard Kleinrock at citation 8, the article of Gary Stix at citation 19 and the words of Vinton Cerf at citation 62, are unknown on this page, and this page tests the article's words as the article prints them.

0.2 The Act is Public Law 102-194, the High-Performance Computing Act of 1991, 105 Stat. 1594, approved December 9, 1991, which this page read in full on November 14, 2026 in the text layer of the scanned pages 1594 through 1604 of volume 105 of the Statutes at Large published by the Government Publishing Office. The statement of Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf is “Al Gore and the Internet”, by Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf, sent by Vinton G. Cerf on September 29, 2000 to the nettime list, which this page read in full on November 14, 2026 in the list's archive. Wikipedia High Performance Computing Act of 1991: Disagreements | Network, Not Protocol, Disagreement 95, reads the same Act and the same statement against the Wikipedia article High Performance Computing Act of 1991.

0.3 Exhibit A reproduces the article from its title through its last heading, without the menus of the site and the editing link of its series box, and divides it into 176 lines: the title, the notice of the encyclopedia, the caption of the portrait and each item of the series box is a line of its own, each heading, caption and item of the list of honors is a line of its own, and each paragraph and each block quotation is divided into its sentences. D1 of The Governing Definitions and Controlling Facts of Telecommunications Internetworking defines the Internet as “The publicly joinable network of networks of the registry lineage”, and D2 defines an intranet as a network “whose members join by an owner’s permission”. The Definitions Addendum at section 12.0 reproduces D1 through D13 in full.

1.0 The article says that Al Gore “promoted legislation that funded an expansion of the ARPANET, allowing greater public access”, while D4 records that the ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990, the only Act that the article shows Al Gore carrying to enactment was approved on December 9, 1991, and that Act gives its own network to researchers, educators and students.

1.1 Line 10 says: “In the 1980s and 1990s, he promoted legislation that funded an expansion of the ARPANET, allowing greater public access, and helping to develop the Internet.”

1.2 D4 of The Governing Definitions and Controlling Facts of Telecommunications Internetworking records that the ARPANET was owned and access-controlled by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the United States Department of Defense “from its commissioning in 1969 until its decommissioning in 1990”, and that “no member of the public could join it, buy from it, or sell across it on any day of its twenty-one years.” The article names two bills of Al Gore: S-2594, the Supercomputer Network Study Act of 1986, at line 22, and the Act of 1991 at line 23, line 25 and line 28.

1.3 Public Law 102-194, the High-Performance Computing Act of 1991, 105 Stat. 1594 defines its network in section 4(4): “"Network" means a computer network referred to as the National Research and Education Network established under section 102”. Section 102(b) directs that agencies work with others “in order to ensure that the researchers, educators, and students have access, as appropriate, to the Network.” The Act records that it was “Approved December 9, 1991.”

1.4 The kind is a documentary finding. The Act of December 9, 1991 was approved after the ARPANET had been decommissioned in 1990, and the Act funds a National Research and Education Network whose access the Act gives to researchers, educators and students, so the Act did not fund an expansion of the ARPANET and did not open the ARPANET to the public. The article shows no legislation of Al Gore that funded the ARPANET, and under D4 no member of the public could join the ARPANET on any day of its existence. Governing Definitions, D4.

1.5 Corrected statement: Senator Al Gore introduced S. 272, approved on December 9, 1991 as Public Law 102-194, the High-Performance Computing Act of 1991, which established a National Research and Education Network for researchers, educators and students, after the ARPANET, an intranet of the Advanced Research Projects Agency closed to the public, had been decommissioned in 1990.

2.0 The article prints the words of Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf that “the Internet, as we know it today, was not deployed until 1983”, while D4 records that TCP was added to the ARPANET intranet on January 1, 1983 and D9 records that the Internet was born in 1991.

2.1 Line 19 says: “He was the first elected official to grasp the potential of computer communications to have a broader impact than just improving the conduct of science and scholarship ... the Internet, as we know it today, was not deployed until 1983.” Line 20 says: “When the Internet was still in the early stages of its deployment, Congressman Gore provided intellectual leadership by helping create the vision of the potential benefits of high speed computing and communication.”

2.2 D4 of The Governing Definitions and Controlling Facts of Telecommunications Internetworking states that the ARPANET intranet carried its traffic “under the Network Control Program, an optional protocol first specified in RFC 33 of February 1970, before TCP was added to it on January 1, 1983; a protocol added to a working network fourteen years after the network was procured is an add-on to that network, not its birth.” D9 of The Governing Definitions and Controlling Facts of Telecommunications Internetworking states: “The capital-I Internet was born in 1991, when PSINet, AlterNet under UUNET, and CERFnet, independently operated commercial networks of the registry lineage, established the Commercial Internet eXchange, a settlement-free router interconnection with open admission and no purpose-screening policy”.

2.3 The kind is a definitional finding under D4 and D9. The event of 1983 that line 19 calls the deployment of the Internet is the addition of the optional protocol TCP to the ARPANET, an intranet of the Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the Internet of D1 was born eight years later, in 1991. Line 13 records that Al Gore served as a Congressman from 1977 to 1985, so the Internet of D1 did not exist in any stage of deployment while Al Gore was a Congressman, as line 20 says it did. Governing Definitions, D4 and D9.

2.4 Corrected statement: The Advanced Research Projects Agency added the optional protocol TCP to its ARPANET intranet on January 1, 1983, while Al Gore was a Congressman, and the Internet of D1 was born in 1991, when PSINet, AlterNet and CERFnet established the Commercial Internet Exchange.

3.0 The article says that “the ARPANET, first deployed by Kleinrock and others in 1969, is the predecessor of the Internet”, while D1.8 states that the ARPANET is not the grandfather, the ancestor, the parent, or the precursor of the Internet.

3.1 Line 23 says: “As a senator, Gore began to craft the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991 (commonly referred to as "The Gore Bill"[5]) after hearing the 1988 report Toward a National Research Network[6] submitted to Congress by a group chaired by University of California, Los Angeles professor of computer science, Leonard Kleinrock, one of the central creators of the ARPANET (the ARPANET, first deployed by Kleinrock and others in 1969, is the predecessor of the Internet).[7]”

3.2 D1.8 of The Governing Definitions and Controlling Facts of Telecommunications Internetworking states: “The ARPANET is not the grandfather, the ancestor, the parent, or the precursor of the Internet.” It also states: “The ARPANET was an intranet, because the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the United States Department of Defense owned the ARPANET and admitted the ARPANET’s members by permission.”

3.3 The kind is a definitional finding under D1.1 and D1.8. Under D1.1 a network stands in the lineage of the Internet only if it carried open admission, and the ARPANET never carried it, so the ARPANET is not the predecessor of the Internet. Governing Definitions, D1.1 and D1.8.

3.4 Corrected statement: Leonard Kleinrock of the University of California, Los Angeles chaired the group that submitted the report Toward a National Research Network of 1988, and his laboratory was the site of the first node of the ARPANET, an intranet of the Advanced Research Projects Agency, in 1969.

4.0 The article names the Act of 1991 the “High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991” and says that “The bill was passed on December 9, 1991”, while the Act names itself the High-Performance Computing Act of 1991 and records that it passed the Senate on September 11, 1991, passed the House on November 20, 1991 and was approved on December 9, 1991.

4.1 Line 23 names the bill that Al Gore began to craft as a senator “the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991”. Line 25 prints the words of Leonard Kleinrock: “A second development occurred around this time, namely, then-Senator Al Gore, a strong and knowledgeable proponent of the Internet, promoted legislation that resulted in President George H.W Bush signing the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991.” Line 28 says: “The bill was passed on December 9, 1991, and led to the National Information Infrastructure (NII)[9] which Gore referred to as the "information superhighway".”

4.2 Section 1 of Public Law 102-194, the High-Performance Computing Act of 1991, 105 Stat. 1594 states: “This Act may be cited as the "High-Performance Computing Act of 1991".” The legislative history printed at the end of the Act records “Sept. 11, S. 272 considered and passed Senate”, “Nov. 20, S. 272 considered and passed House, amended”, “Nov. 22, Senate concurred in House amendments”, and “Approved December 9, 1991.”

4.3 The kind is a documentary finding of a name. The Act carries no words “and Communication” in its name, and December 9, 1991 is the date of its approval, while its passage in the two houses of Congress was completed on November 22, 1991. “Al Gore and the Internet”, by Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf, sent by Vinton G. Cerf on September 29, 2000 names the Act “the High Performance Computing and Communications Act”, as 4.4 of Wikipedia High Performance Computing Act of 1991: Disagreements | Network, Not Protocol records, and the Act does not carry that name either.

4.4 Corrected statement: S. 272, which section 1 of Public Law 102-194 cites as the High-Performance Computing Act of 1991, passed the Senate on September 11, 1991, passed the House with amendment on November 20, 1991, was concurred in by the Senate on November 22, 1991, and was approved by President George H. W. Bush on December 9, 1991.

5.0 The article calls the Mosaic web browser of 1993 “the commercial Internet’s technological springboard”, while under D8 a web browser is an application and under D9 the commercial Internet was born in 1991, two years before Mosaic.

5.1 Line 34 says: “This World Wide Web browser is credited by most scholars as beginning the Internet boom of the 1990s:” Line 35 says: “Gore's legislation also helped fund the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, where a team of programmers, including Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, created the Mosaic Web browser, the commercial Internet's technological springboard.”

5.2 D8 of The Governing Definitions and Controlling Facts of Telecommunications Internetworking records “NCSA Mosaic released in 1993 putting a graphical browser in front of” the World Wide Web and states that “the Web is an application using the Internet platform, and the application is not the platform.” D9 of The Governing Definitions and Controlling Facts of Telecommunications Internetworking states: “The capital-I Internet was born in 1991, when PSINet, AlterNet under UUNET, and CERFnet, independently operated commercial networks of the registry lineage, established the Commercial Internet eXchange, a settlement-free router interconnection with open admission and no purpose-screening policy”.

5.3 The kind is a definitional finding under D8 and D9. The words “the commercial Internet's technological springboard” at line 35 give to a browser of 1993 the making of a commercial network of networks that the operators of PSINet, AlterNet and CERFnet had opened in 1991, and this page makes no finding on the boom of the 1990s that line 34 credits to the browser. Governing Definitions, D8 and D9.

5.4 Corrected statement: A team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, including Marc Andreessen, created the Mosaic web browser in 1993, a graphical browser for the World Wide Web, which ran across the commercial Internet that PSINet, AlterNet and CERFnet had opened at the Commercial Internet Exchange in 1991.

6.0 The article says, inside the quotation that it gives to the article of Gary Stix of May 1993, that Al Gore “is also noted for his creation of the internet”, while D9 records that the Internet was born in 1991 when PSINet, AlterNet and CERFnet established the Commercial Internet Exchange.

6.1 Line 47 says: “Stix described them as a "distinct statement about where the new administration stands on the matter of technology ...” Line 48 says: “Gone is the ambivalence or outright hostility toward government involvement in little beyond basic science.” Line 49 says: “Although Gore is most famous for his political career and environmental work, he is also noted for his creation of the internet."[19]”

6.2 D9 of The Governing Definitions and Controlling Facts of Telecommunications Internetworking states: “The capital-I Internet was born in 1991, when PSINet, AlterNet under UUNET, and CERFnet, independently operated commercial networks of the registry lineage, established the Commercial Internet eXchange, a settlement-free router interconnection with open admission and no purpose-screening policy”. The release headed “General Atomics, Performance Systems International and UUNET Technologies, Inc. Establish the First Commercial Internet Exchange (CIX)”, dated March 25, 1991 and preserved on marknichols.com, announces that “The CIX agreement provides for all customers of AlterNet, CERFnet and PSINet to exchange Internet traffic directly, regardless of which network the customer obtains service from, and at no additional cost.”

6.3 The kind is a definitional finding under D9. The operators who created the Internet of D1 are named by D9 and by their own release of March 25, 1991, and neither names Al Gore. Line 140 of the same article prints the words of Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the United States House of Representatives: “Gore is not the Father of the Internet”. The quotation that the article opens at line 47 and closes at line 49 gives the sentence to Gary Stix, the text of whose article of May 1993 is unknown on this page, and the finding is made on the sentence as the article prints it. Governing Definitions, D9.

6.4 Corrected statement: Al Gore is noted for his political career, his environmental work and his sponsorship of the High-Performance Computing Act of 1991, and the Internet of D1 was created in 1991 by General Atomics, Performance Systems International, Inc. and UUNET Technologies, Inc., the operators of CERFnet, PSINet and AlterNet, at the Commercial Internet Exchange.

7.0 The article prints the words of Al Gore of March 9, 1999, “During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet”, while the Internet of D1 was created by the agreement of three commercial operators announced on March 25, 1991, which names no member of Congress and no Act, and the Act that Al Gore introduced was approved nine months later and uses the word Internet nowhere.

7.1 Line 122 says: “During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.”

7.2 D9 of The Governing Definitions and Controlling Facts of Telecommunications Internetworking states: “The capital-I Internet was born in 1991, when PSINet, AlterNet under UUNET, and CERFnet, independently operated commercial networks of the registry lineage, established the Commercial Internet eXchange, a settlement-free router interconnection with open admission and no purpose-screening policy”. The release headed “General Atomics, Performance Systems International and UUNET Technologies, Inc. Establish the First Commercial Internet Exchange (CIX)”, dated March 25, 1991 and preserved on marknichols.com, announces that “The CIX agreement provides for all customers of AlterNet, CERFnet and PSINet to exchange Internet traffic directly, regardless of which network the customer obtains service from, and at no additional cost.” The word Internet appears nowhere in the eleven pages of Public Law 102-194, the High-Performance Computing Act of 1991, 105 Stat. 1594, which was “Approved December 9, 1991.”

7.3 The kind is a definitional finding under D1 and D9. The act that created the Internet of D1 is the agreement of General Atomics, Performance Systems International, Inc. and UUNET Technologies, Inc. announced on March 25, 1991, and the initiative that Al Gore carried to enactment in Congress, the Act of December 9, 1991, followed that agreement by nine months and names neither the Internet nor those companies. In “Al Gore and the Internet”, by Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf, sent by Vinton G. Cerf on September 29, 2000, which the article quotes at line 130 and line 131, Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf write that “No one person or even small group of persons exclusively "invented" the Internet.” Governing Definitions, D1 and D9.

7.4 Corrected statement: During his service in the United States Congress, Al Gore took the initiative in creating the National Research and Education Network of the High-Performance Computing Act of 1991, approved on December 9, 1991, and the Internet of D1 had been created on March 25, 1991 by General Atomics, Performance Systems International, Inc. and UUNET Technologies, Inc. at the Commercial Internet Exchange.

8.0 The article prints the words of Vinton Cerf that the initiatives of Al Gore “led directly to the commercialization of the Internet”, while the commercial Internet was opened by the agreement of three commercial operators announced on March 25, 1991, nine months before the Act of Al Gore was approved, and that Act sends the use of its own network by commercial providers to a study of feasibility.

8.1 Line 136 says: “His initiatives led directly to the commercialization of the Internet.”

8.2 The release headed “General Atomics, Performance Systems International and UUNET Technologies, Inc. Establish the First Commercial Internet Exchange (CIX)”, dated March 25, 1991 and preserved on marknichols.com, announces that “The CIX agreement provides for all customers of AlterNet, CERFnet and PSINet to exchange Internet traffic directly, regardless of which network the customer obtains service from, and at no additional cost.” Section 102(g)(4) of Public Law 102-194, the High-Performance Computing Act of 1991, 105 Stat. 1594 directs a report on “the technological feasibility of allowing commercial information service providers to use the Network and other federally funded research networks”, and section 102(c)(4) directs that the Network “be designed, developed, and operated in a manner which promotes research and development leading to development of commercial data communications and telecommunications standards, whose development will encourage the establishment of privately operated high-speed commercial networks”.

8.3 The kind is a scope overstatement. The Act of December 9, 1991 directs a study of commercial use and encourages commercial networks to come, and in “Al Gore and the Internet”, by Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf, sent by Vinton G. Cerf on September 29, 2000 Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf credit Al Gore with “much-needed political support for the speedy privatization of the Internet”, so the documents establish support from Al Gore for commerce on networks. The documents do not establish that the initiatives of Al Gore led directly to the commercialization of the Internet, because the commercial Internet was opened by PSINet, AlterNet and CERFnet on the agreement announced on March 25, 1991, and that release names no government initiative.

8.4 Corrected statement: General Atomics, Performance Systems International, Inc. and UUNET Technologies, Inc. opened the commercial Internet at the Commercial Internet Exchange, announced on March 25, 1991, and the High-Performance Computing Act of 1991 that Al Gore introduced, approved on December 9, 1991, directed a study of commercial use of its research network and encouraged the establishment of privately operated commercial networks.

9.0 163 lines of the article are examined and not disputed on this page, and the article's quotations of Robert Kahn, Vinton Cerf and Newt Gingrich are recorded here as the article prints them.

9.1 Line 9 says that Al Gore served “as the Vice President from 1993 to 2001”, and line 13 says that he served first “as a Congressman (1977–1985)”. Line 17 introduces the quotation of Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf at line 18 through line 20, and line 18 prints “high-speed telecommunications” where “Al Gore and the Internet”, by Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf, sent by Vinton G. Cerf on September 29, 2000 reads “high speed telecommunications”. Line 126, line 130 and line 131 quote the same statement, and its words “No one in public life has been more intellectually engaged in helping to create the climate for a thriving Internet than the Vice President.” stand in the statement as line 126 prints them.

9.2 Line 22 names S-2594, the Supercomputer Network Study Act of 1986, whose text this page has not read and on which it makes no finding. Line 26 says that the Act “allocated $600 million”, and 4.3 of Wikipedia High Performance Computing Act of 1991: Disagreements | Network, Not Protocol records the authorizations of the Act by fiscal year and does not decide which figure the words describe. Line 52 gives a count of 313,000 computers “on the Internet” in the fall of 1990, and this page does not test the count.

9.3 Line 140 prints the words of Newt Gingrich, “Gore is not the Father of the Internet”, and line 150 prints the joke of Vinton Cerf at the Webby Awards of 2005, “We all invented the Internet.” Line 168 records the First Annual Cisco Systems Circle Award of 1993 to Al Gore “In recognition of his visionary leadership in building global awareness of computer networking through the National Information Highway Initiative.”

9.4 The remaining 150 lines, 1 through 8, 11, 12, 14 through 16, 21, 24, 27, 29 through 33, 36 through 46, 50, 51, 53 through 121, 123 through 125, 127 through 129, 132 through 135, 137 through 139, 141 through 149, 151 through 167 and 169 through 176, state the title, the notice of the encyclopedia, the caption and the series box, the headings, the account of the information superhighway, the encryption policy, NetDay, the online events, the interview of March 9, 1999 and its aftermath, the later career of Al Gore and the list of honors, and this page makes no finding on them.

10.0 The claims on this page are open to documented challenge on the standing terms of marknichols.com, and the terms are stated here in full.

10.1 The claims on this page are open to challenge on the same terms as every claim on marknichols.com. A challenger who holds that a claim on this page is wrong, or that the Internet is something other than the publicly joinable network of networks of the registry lineage defined at The Governing Definitions and Controlling Facts of Telecommunications Internetworking, states the competing claim or definition in one sentence, names the document that carries it and the document’s date, and sends both to mark@marknichols.com. A challenge submitted with its document is answered on this page, and a competing definition submitted with its document is added to this page as an exhibit with attribution to the person who submitted it; a challenge submitted without a document is an opinion and is heard as one.

10.2 The distinction the site’s definition rests on, that protocols enable interoperability and are not the Internet, is stated in the IETF’s own words, RFC 2026 and STD 1, in the Internet-Draft draft-mnichols-protocols-not-the-internet-01, posted by Mark Nichols to the IETF Datatracker on September 25, 2026 at https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-mnichols-protocols-not-the-internet/ and stated on this site at Protocols Are Not the Internet: The IETF Internet-Draft by Mark Nichols, so a challenger may also address the definition in the venue that publishes the protocol standards themselves. Any person who holds expertise in telecommunications and a competing claim or definition is invited to bring both, in writing, with the document.

11.0 Exhibit A reproduces the Wikipedia article Al Gore and information technology line by line, numbered in the order of the page and anchored for citation.

11.1 Exhibit A. Wikipedia, Al Gore and information technology, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_technology, as supplied by Mark Nichols on November 14, 2026. Line 1 is the title, lines 2 through 8 are the notice of the encyclopedia, the caption of the portrait and the series box, lines 9 and 10 are the opening paragraph, lines 11 through 173 are the body of the article and its list of honors, and lines 174 through 176 are its last headings, in the order of the page.

1. Al Gore and information technology

2. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

3. Al Gore, 2007

4. This article is part of a series about Al Gore

5. Personal

6. 45th Vice President of the United States

7. Vice presidential campaigns

8. Presidential campaigns

9. Al Gore is a United States politician who served successively in the House of Representatives, the Senate, and as the Vice President from 1993 to 2001.

10. In the 1980s and 1990s, he promoted legislation that funded an expansion of the ARPANET, allowing greater public access, and helping to develop the Internet.

11. Congressional work and Gore Bill

12. Prior to the late 1970s, data communication was primarily on time sharing services, such as those of General Electric.

13. Gore had been involved with computers since the late 1970s, first as a Congressman (1977–1985) and later as senator and vice president.

14. A 1998 article described him as a "genuine nerd, with a geek reputation running back to his day as a futurist 'Atari Democrat' in the House.

15. Before computers were comprehensible ... Gore struggled to explain artificial intelligence and fiber-optic networks to sleepy colleagues."[1]

16. According to Campbell-Kelly and Aspray (Computer: A History of the Information Machine), up until the early 1990s public usage of the Internet was limited and the "problem of giving ordinary Americans network access had excited Senator Al Gore since the late 1970s."[2]

17. Of Gore's involvement in the then-developing Internet while in Congress, Internet pioneers Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn have also noted:

18. As far back as the 1970s Congressman Gore promoted the idea of high-speed telecommunications as an engine for both economic growth and the improvement of our educational system.

19. He was the first elected official to grasp the potential of computer communications to have a broader impact than just improving the conduct of science and scholarship ... the Internet, as we know it today, was not deployed until 1983.

20. When the Internet was still in the early stages of its deployment, Congressman Gore provided intellectual leadership by helping create the vision of the potential benefits of high speed computing and communication.

21. As an example, he sponsored hearings on how advanced technologies might be put to use in areas like coordinating the response of government agencies to natural disasters and other crises.[3]

22. On June 24, 1986, Gore introduced S-2594, Supercomputer Network Study Act of 1986.[4]

23. As a senator, Gore began to craft the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991 (commonly referred to as "The Gore Bill"[5]) after hearing the 1988 report Toward a National Research Network[6] submitted to Congress by a group chaired by University of California, Los Angeles professor of computer science, Leonard Kleinrock, one of the central creators of the ARPANET (the ARPANET, first deployed by Kleinrock and others in 1969, is the predecessor of the Internet).[7]

24. Indeed, Kleinrock would later credit both Gore and the Gore Bill as a critical moment in Internet history:

25. A second development occurred around this time, namely, then-Senator Al Gore, a strong and knowledgeable proponent of the Internet, promoted legislation that resulted in President George H.W Bush signing the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991.

26. This Act allocated $600 million for high performance computing and for the creation of the National Research and Education Network [13–14].

27. The NREN brought together industry, academia and government in a joint effort to accelerate the development and deployment of gigabit/sec networking.[8]

28. The bill was passed on December 9, 1991, and led to the National Information Infrastructure (NII)[9] which Gore referred to as the "information superhighway".

29. President George H. W. Bush predicted that the bill would help "unlock the secrets of DNA," open up foreign markets to free trade, and a promise of cooperation between government, academia, and industry.[10]

30. Prior to its passage, Gore discussed the basics of the bill in an article for the September 1991 issue of Scientific American entitled Scientific American presents the September 1991 Single Copy Issue: Communications, Computers, and Networks.

31. His essay, "Infrastructure for the Global Village", commented on the lack of network access described above and argued: "Rather than holding back, the U.S. should lead by building the information infrastructure, essential if all Americans are to gain access to this transforming technology"[11]"... high speed networks must be built that tie together millions of computers, providing capabilities that we cannot even imagine."[12]

32. Mosaic

33. Perhaps one of the most important results of the Gore Bill was the development of Mosaic in 1993.[13][14]

34. This World Wide Web browser is credited by most scholars as beginning the Internet boom of the 1990s:

35. Gore's legislation also helped fund the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, where a team of programmers, including Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, created the Mosaic Web browser, the commercial Internet's technological springboard.

36. 'If it had been left to private industry, it wouldn't have happened,' Andreessen says of Gore's bill, 'at least, not until years later.'[15]

37. Gore and the Information Superhighway

38. As vice president, Gore promoted the development of what he referred to as the Information Superhighway.

39. This was discussed in detail a few days after winning the election in November 1992 in The New York Times article "Clinton to Promote High Technology, With Gore in Charge."[16]

40. They planned to finance research "that will flood the economy with innovative goods and services, lifting the general level of prosperity and strengthening American industry."[16]

41. Specifically, they were aiming to fund the development of "robotics, smart roads, biotechnology, machine tools, magnetic-levitation trains, fiber-optic communications, and national computer networks.

42. Also earmarked are a raft of basic technologies like digital imaging and data storage."[16]

43. These initiatives were met with some skepticism from critics who claimed that "the initiative is likely to backfire, bloating Congressional pork, and creating whole new categories of Federal waste."[16]

44. These initiatives were outlined in the report Technology for America's Economic Growth.[17]

45. In September 1993, they released a report calling for the creation of a "nationwide information superhighway," which would primarily be built by private industry.[18]

46. Gary Stix commented on these initiatives a few months prior in his May 1993 article for Scientific American, "Gigabit Gestalt: Clinton and Gore embrace an activist technology policy."

47. Stix described them as a "distinct statement about where the new administration stands on the matter of technology ...

48. Gone is the ambivalence or outright hostility toward government involvement in little beyond basic science.

49. Although Gore is most famous for his political career and environmental work, he is also noted for his creation of the internet."[19]

50. Campbell-Kelly and Aspray further note in Computer: A History of the Information Machine:

51. In the early 1990s the Internet was big news ...

52. In the fall of 1990, there were just 313,000 computers on the Internet; by 1996, there were close to 10 million.

53. The networking idea became politicized during the 1992 Clinton–Gore election campaign, where the rhetoric of the information highway captured the public imagination.

54. On taking office in 1993, the new administration set in place a range of government initiatives for a National Information Infrastructure aimed at ensuring that all American citizens ultimately gain access to the new networks.[20]

55. These initiatives were discussed in a number of venues.

56. Howard Rheingold argued in the 1994 afterword to his noted text, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, that these initiatives played a critical role in the development of digital technology, stating that, "Two powerful forces drove the rapid emergence of the superhighway notion in 1994 ....

57. The second driving force behind the superhighway idea continued to be Vice President Gore."[21]

58. In addition, Clinton and Gore submitted the report, Science in the National Interest in 1994,[22] which further outlined their plans to develop science and technology in the United States.

59. Gore also discussed these plans in speeches that he made at The Superhighway Summit[23] at UCLA and for the International Telecommunication Union.[24]

60. On January 13, 1994, Gore "became the first U.S. vice president to hold a live interactive news conference on an international computer network".[25]

61. Gore was also asked to write the foreword to the first edition of the 1993 internet guide, The Internet Companion: A Beginner's Guide to Global Networking by Tracy LaQuey.

62. In the foreword, he stated the following:

63. Since I first became interested in high-speed networking almost seventeen years ago, there have been many major advances both in the technology and in public awareness.

64. Articles on high-speed networks are commonplace in major newspapers and in news magazines.

65. In contrast, when as a House member in the early 1980s, I called for creation of a national network of "information superhighways," the only people interested were the manufacturers of optical fiber.

66. Back then, of course, high-speed meant 56,000 bits per second.

67. Today we are building a national information infrastructure that will carry billions of bits of data per second, serve thousands of users simultaneously, and transmit not only electronic mail and data files but voice and video as well.[26]

68. The Clinton–Gore administration launched the first official White House website on 21 October 1994.[27][28]

69. It would be followed by three more versions, resulting in the final edition launched in 2000.[28][29]

70. The White House website was part of a general movement by this administration towards web-based communication: "Clinton and Gore were responsible for pressing almost all federal agencies, the U.S. court system, and the U.S. military onto the Internet, thus opening up America's government to more of America's citizens than ever before.

71. On 17 July 1996.

72. President Clinton issued Executive Order 13011 – Federal Information Technology, ordering the heads of all federal agencies to fully utilize information technology to make the information of the agency easily accessible to the public."[30]

73. The Clipper Chip, which "Clinton inherited from a multi-year National Security Agency effort,"[31] was a method of hardware encryption with a government backdoor.

74. In 1994, Vice President Gore issued a memo on the topic of encryption, which stated that under a new policy the White House would "provide better encryption to individuals and businesses while ensuring that the needs of law enforcement and national security are met.

75. Encryption is a law and order issue, since it can be used by criminals to thwart wiretaps and avoid detection and prosecution."[32]

76. Another initiative proposed a software-based key escrow system, in which keys to all encrypted data and communications would reside with a trusted third party.

77. Since the government was seen as possibly having a need to access encrypted data originating in other countries, the pressure to establish such a system was worldwide.[33]

78. These policies met with strong opposition from civil liberties groups,[21] such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, scientific groups like the National Research Council,[34] leading cryptographers,[35] and the European Commission.[36]

79. All three encryption initiatives thus failed to gain widespread acceptance by consumers or support from the industry.[37]

80. The ability of a proposal such as the Clipper Chip to meet the stated goals, especially that of enabling better encryption to individuals, was disputed by a number of experts.[38]

81. With this resistance and lack of industry support, the Clipper Chip and key escrow initiatives were abandoned by 1996.[39]

82. President Bill Clinton installing computer cables with Vice President Al Gore on NetDay at Ygnacio Valley High School in Concord, CA. March 9, 1996

83. Gore had discussed his concerns with computer technology and levels of access in his 1994 article, "No More Information Have and Have Nots."

84. He was particularly interested in implementing measures, which would grant all children access to the Internet, stating:

85. We've got to get it right.

86. We must make sure that all children have access.

87. We have to make sure that the children of Anacostia have that access, not just Bethesda; Watts, not just Brentwood; Chicago's West Side, not just Evanston.

88. That's not the case now.

89. Twenty-two percent of white primary-school students have computers in their homes; less than 7% of African-American children do.

90. We can't create a nation of information haves and have-nots.

91. The on-ramps to the information superhighway must be accessible to all, and that will only happen if the telecommunications industry is accessible to all.[40]

92. Gore had a chance to fulfill this promise when he and President Clinton participated in John Gage's NetDay '96 on March 9, 1996.

93. Clinton and Gore spent the day at Ygnacio Valley High School, as part of the drive to connect California public schools to the Internet.[41]

94. In a speech given at YVH, Clinton stated that he was excited to see that his challenge the previous September to "Californians to connect at least 20 percent of your schools to the Information Superhighway by the end of this school year" was met.

95. Clinton also described this event as part of a time of "absolutely astonishing transformation; a moment of great possibility.

96. All of you know that the information and technology explosion will offer to you and to the young people of the future more opportunities and challenges than any generation of Americans has ever seen."[42]

97. In a prepared statement, Gore added that NetDay was part of one of the major goals of the Clinton administration, which was "to give every child in America access to high quality educational technology by the dawn of the new century."

98. Gore also stated that the administration planned "to connect every classroom to the Internet by the year 2000."[43]

99. On April 28, 1998, Gore honored numerous volunteers who had been involved with NetDay and "who helped connect students to the Internet in 700 of the poorest schools in the country" via "an interactive online session with children across the country."[44]

100. He also reinforced the impact of the Internet on the environment, education, and increased communication between people through his involvement with "the largest one-day online event" for that time, 24 Hours in Cyberspace.

101. The event took place on 8 February 1996, and Second Lady Tipper Gore also participated, acting as one of the event's 150 photographers.[45]

102. Gore contributed the introductory essay to the Earthwatch section of the website,[46] arguing that:

103. The Internet and other new information technologies cannot turn back the ecological clock, of course.

104. But they can help environmental scientists push back the frontiers of knowledge and help ordinary citizens grasp the urgency of preserving our natural world ...

105. But more than delivering information to scientists, equipping citizens with new tools to improve their world, and making offices cheaper and more efficient, Cyberspace is achieving something even more enduring and profound: It's changing the very way we think.

106. It is extending our reach, and that is transforming our grasp.[47]

107. Gore was involved in a number of other projects related to digital technology.

108. He expressed his concerns for online privacy through his 1998 "Electronic Bill of Rights" speech in which he stated: "We need an electronic bill of rights for this electronic age ...

109. You should have the right to choose whether your personal information is disclosed."[48]

110. He also began promoting a NASA satellite that would provide a constant view of Earth, marking the first time such an image would have been made since The Blue Marble photo from the 1972 Apollo 17 mission.

111. The "Triana" satellite would have been permanently mounted in the L1 Lagrangian Point, 1.5 million km away.[49]

112. Gore also became associated with Digital Earth.[50][51]

113. Urban legend that Gore claims to have invented the Internet

114. In a March 9, 1999, interview with CNN's Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, Gore discussed the possibility of running for president in the 2000 election.

115. In response to Wolf Blitzer's question: "Why should Democrats, looking at the Democratic nomination process, support you instead of Bill Bradley", Gore responded:

116. I'll be offering my vision when my campaign begins.

117. And it will be comprehensive and sweeping.

118. And I hope that it will be compelling enough to draw people toward it.

119. I feel that it will be.

120. But it will emerge from my dialogue with the American people.

121. I've traveled to every part of this country during the last six years.

122. During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.

123. 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.[52]

124. After this interview, Gore became the subject of controversy and ridicule when his statement, "I took the initiative in creating the Internet",[53] was widely quoted out of context.

125. It was often misquoted by comedians and figures in American popular media who framed this statement as a claim that Gore believed he had personally invented the Internet.[54]

126. Gore's actual words were widely reaffirmed by notable Internet pioneers, such as Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, who stated, "No one in public life has been more intellectually engaged in helping to create the climate for a thriving Internet than the Vice President."[55]

127. Former UCLA professor of information studies, Philip E. Agre, as well as journalist Eric Boehlert argued that three articles in Wired News led to the creation of the widely spread urban legend that Gore claimed to have "invented the Internet", which followed this interview.[56][57][58]

128. Jim Wilkinson, who at the time was working as congressman Dick Armey's spokesman, also helped sell the idea that Gore claimed to have "invented the internet".[59][60][61]

129. Computer professionals and congressional colleagues argued against this characterization.

130. Internet pioneers Cerf and Kahn stated that "we don't think, as some people have argued, that Gore intended to claim he 'invented' the Internet.

131. Moreover, there is no question in our minds that while serving as Senator, Gore's initiatives had a significant and beneficial effect on the still-evolving Internet."[3][57]

132. Cerf would also later state: "Al Gore had seen what happened with the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956, which his father introduced as a military bill.

133. It was very powerful.

134. Housing went up, suburban boom happened, everybody became mobile.

135. Al was attuned to the power of networking much more than any of his elective colleagues.

136. His initiatives led directly to the commercialization of the Internet.

137. So he really does deserve credit."[62]

138. Al Gore, Newt Gingrich, and President Bill Clinton in 1997

139. In a speech to the American Political Science Association, Newt Gingrich, the former Republican Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, also stated: "In all fairness, it's something Gore had worked on a long time.

140. Gore is not the Father of the Internet, but in all fairness, Gore is the person who, in the Congress, most systematically worked to make sure that we got to an Internet, and the truth is—and I worked with him starting in 1978 when I got [to Congress], we were both part of a 'futures group'—the fact is, in the Clinton administration, the world we had talked about in the '80s began to actually happen."[63]

141. In 2008, Wolf Blitzer (who conducted the original 1999 interview) stated:

142. I didn't ask him about the Internet.

143. I asked him about the differences he had with Bill Bradley ...

144. Honestly, at the time, when he said it, it didn't dawn on me that this was going to have the impact that it wound up having, because it was distorted to a certain degree and people said they took what he said, which was a carefully phrased comment about taking the initiative in creating the Internet to—I invented the Internet.

145. And that was the sort of shorthand, the way his enemies projected it and it wound up being a devastating setback to him and it hurt him, as I'm sure he acknowledges to this very day.[64]

146. Gore himself would later poke fun at the controversy.

147. In 2000, while on the Late Show with David Letterman he read Letterman's Top 10 List (which for this show was called the "Top Ten Rejected Gore – Lieberman Campaign Slogans") to the audience.

148. Number nine on the list was "Remember, America, I gave you the Internet, and I can take it away!"[65]

149. In 2005, when Gore was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award "for three decades of contributions to the Internet" at the Webby Awards,[66][67] he joked in his acceptance speech (limited to five words according to Webby Awards rules): "Please don't recount this vote."

150. He was introduced by Vint Cerf who used the same format to joke: "We all invented the Internet."

151. Gore, who was then asked to add a few more words to his speech, stated: "It is time to reinvent the Internet for all of us to make it more robust and much more accessible and use it to reinvigorate our democracy."[67]

152. Post-vice presidency

153. Gore continued his involvement with the computer industry and new technologies after he left the White House in 2001.

154. He was a member of the Board of Directors of Apple Inc. as of 2008.[68]

155. Emmy and Current TV

156. On May 4, 2004, INdTV Holdings, a company co-founded by Gore and Joel Hyatt, purchased cable news channel NewsWorld International from Vivendi Universal.

157. The new network would not "be a liberal network, a Democratic network or a political network", Gore said, but would serve as an "independent voice" for a target audience of people between 18 and 34 "who want to learn about the world in a voice they recognize and a view they recognize as their own."[69]

158. The network was relaunched under the name Current TV on August 1, 2005.

159. On September 16, 2007, Current TV won the Outstanding Creative Achievement in Interactive Television award at the 2007 Primetime Emmys[70] for its use of online technologies with television.

160. In his acceptance speech, Gore stated, "we are trying to open up the television medium so that viewers can help to make television and join the conversation of democracy and reclaim American democracy by talking about the choices we have to make.

161. More to come.

162. Current.com.

163. Next month."[71]

164. The Assault on Reason

165. Gore's 2007 book, The Assault on Reason, is an analysis of what he calls the "emptying out of the marketplace of ideas" in civic discourse due to the influence of electronic media (especially television), and which endangers American democracy.

166. However, Gore also expresses the belief that the Internet can revitalize and ultimately "redeem the integrity of representative democracy."[72]

167. Selected honors and awards

168. 1993 First Annual Cisco Systems Circle Award: "In recognition of his visionary leadership in building global awareness of computer networking through the National Information Highway Initiative."[73]

169. 1998 The Computerworld Honors Program Honoring Those Who Use Information Technology to Benefit Society: Toshiba America Leadership Award for Education[74]

170. 2005 Webby Award: Lifetime Achievement Award (interactive technology)[66][67]

171. 2007 Quill Awards: History/current events/politics, The Assault on Reason

172. 2007 International Academy of Television Arts and Sciences: Founders Award for Current TV and for work in the area of global warming[75]

173. 2007 Primetime Emmy Award: Outstanding Creative Achievement in Interactive Television for Current TV (interactive technology)

174. See also

175. Partnership for Advancing Technology in Housing

176. Selected publications

12.0 The Definitions Addendum reproduces the Governing Definitions D1 through D13 of marknichols.com word for word, and every finding on this page is made under them.

12.1 Every finding on this page is made under the Governing Definitions of marknichols.com, D1 through D13, which are reproduced in this addendum word for word from The Governing Definitions and Controlling Facts of Telecommunications Internetworking. A reader of this page either accepts these definitions or disputes them. A reader who disputes a definition states the competing definition in one sentence and names the dated document that carries it before opining on any finding of this page. A reader who opines on the findings without disputing a definition has read the findings under these definitions by default.

12.2 The definitions below are copied word for word from the section “These definitions are employed throughout marknichols.com” of The Governing Definitions and Controlling Facts of Telecommunications Internetworking, as that page read on November 13, 2026, and that page controls wherever a copy differs from it.

D1. The Internet (capital I). The publicly joinable network of networks of the registry lineage: the fabric whose addresses and autonomous system numbers were issued by the InterNIC and are maintained today by ARIN. A person joins it by purchasing access from any of competing commercial providers, for any lawful purpose, and a network joins it by obtaining addresses and an autonomous system number from the numbering registry and then interconnecting by agreement with any willing network, the way Digital Island joined under autonomous system AS6553, issued August 29, 1996 by the InterNIC, with the registration maintained today in ARIN’s registry. No owner grants admission, no written policy screens members or their purposes, and no government sponsorship is required, and that single property, open admission, is what separates the Internet from every gated network that existed before it. The capital-I Internet was born in 1991, when independently operated commercial networks of this lineage, PSINet, AlterNet under UUNET, and CERFnet, interconnected by their own agreement as the Commercial Internet eXchange (CIX), settlement-free and free of any purpose-screening policy, and it was born small: the gated research world stood beside it until April 30, 1995, upon the decommission of NSFNET folded into internetMCI, per orders of Congress. Neither the ARPANET intranet, which admitted members only by agency authorization, nor the NSFNET intranet, which admitted members only under a written Acceptable Use Policy restricted to research and education, met this definition on any day of either existence, so the capital I names an Internet network that is public, or it names nothing. Paragraphs D1.1 through D1.7 state why the ARPANET and the NSFNET are not in the lineage of the Internet, each on its document.

D1.1 A network stands in the lineage of the Internet only if it carried the trait that defines the Internet, and D1 names that trait as one property, open admission; a network that never carried open admission had no such trait to pass on, and the ARPANET and the NSFNET never carried it, so neither the ARPANET nor the NSFNET is the grandfather, the ancestor, the parent, or the precursor of the Internet, and neither the ARPANET nor the NSFNET became the Internet.

D1.2 The ARPANET admitted members by its owner’s authorization from its procurement to its end: Request for Quotations No. DAHC15 69 Q 0002, issued July 29, 1968 for the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the United States Department of Defense, states the network’s purpose as “making these advanced research computer systems available to users outside their own design circle,” a purpose among the owner’s research contractors, as F37 of this page records; admission ran through agency authorization, as D4 of this page records; and the ARPANET ran from 1969 to 1990, as F38 of this page records, so the ARPANET was an intranet under D2 on every day of its existence and never carried open admission.

D1.3 The NSFNET admitted members only under a written Acceptable Use Policy restricted to research and education, as D7 of this page records, and its backbone was terminated on April 30, 1995, when its regional networks passed principally to internetMCI and SprintLink, which, in the words of Merit Network, the operator of record, absorbed the NSFNET regionals as their customers, so the NSFNET’s member networks joined the Internet as customers on terms the NSFNET never offered, and the NSFNET itself ended and did not become the Internet.

D1.4 The trait that defines the Internet has a documented origin outside the gated networks: the release of March 25, 1991 by General Atomics, Performance Systems International, Inc., and UUNET Technologies, Inc., seated at F52 of this page, states that the three networks “are not subject to government mandated “acceptable use” restrictions on their traffic,” states that the agreement can be expanded “to include any commercial service which has no restrictions on traffic use,” and states that the exchange allows firms to communicate “without traversing the government restricted backbones, such as the NSFNET (National Science Foundation Network),” so the Internet was built by agreement among commercial networks to carry traffic around the gated backbone, and the Internet did not grow out of the gated backbone.

D1.5 The ARPANET, the NSFNET, and the Internet each performed internetworking under D3, and a shared function is not a shared lineage: RFC 2026, The Internet Standards Process, Revision 3, by Scott O. Bradner of Harvard University, published October 1996, states at its section 1.1 that “There are also many isolated interconnected networks, which are not connected to the global Internet but use the Internet Standards,” so a network that uses the same protocols as the Internet is a user of the same tools and is not thereby the Internet or its ancestor. A redwood and a palm are both called trees, and a redwood did not grow from a palm, and a palm cannot become a redwood; the gated internets of the ARPANET and the NSFNET and the capital-I Internet are both called internets, and the shared word names a shared function and not a shared tree. The shared word was applied to the gated networks in error, and this record documents the error by document and date: the Stanford University bronze dedicated July 28, 2005 casts the headline “BIRTH OF THE INTERNET” above an inscription that records protocol work, as Stanford University Is Petitioned to Retract the Headline of Its BIRTH OF THE INTERNET Plaque records; RFC 1208, A Glossary of Networking Terms, by Ole J. Jacobsen and Daniel C. Lynch of Interop, Inc., published March 1991 as a document that in its own words “does not specify an Internet standard,” calls the ARPANET the “grandfather” of today’s Internet with no document for the descent it asserts; and IEEE Milestone 94 of October 29, 2009 is titled “Birthplace of the Internet, 1969,” as F46.1 of this page records.

D1.6 The registry lineage named in D1 is a continuity of numbering administration, the assignment of network addresses and autonomous system numbers by the Network Information Center at SRI, then by the InterNIC, and today by ARIN, and the registry lineage is not a lineage of networks: the Network Information Center at SRI kept the Official Host Table of the ARPANET’s era, as D4 of this page records, and a number assigned by a registry admits no one to any network, so the continuity of the numbering places no gated network in the lineage of the Internet.

D1.7 On every page of marknichols.com, the ARPANET and the NSFNET are named earlier gated networks, networks that also performed internetworking, or intranets under D2, and no page of marknichols.com calls either network the grandfather, the ancestor, the parent, the precursor, or the forerunner of the Internet, places either network in the lineage of the Internet, or states that either network became, evolved into, or grew into the Internet, under the ruling of Mark Nichols of November 7, 2026 that the ARPANET and the NSFNET belong to the history of internetworking and not to the lineage of the Internet, and that the Internet is a separate species.

D1.8 The plain statements of D1.1 through D1.7 are these. The ARPANET is not the Internet. The NSFNET is not the Internet. The ARPANET did not become the Internet. The NSFNET did not become the Internet. The ARPANET is not the grandfather, the ancestor, the parent, or the precursor of the Internet. The NSFNET is not the grandfather, the ancestor, the parent, or the precursor of the Internet. The ARPANET was an intranet, because the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the United States Department of Defense owned the ARPANET and admitted the ARPANET’s members by permission. The NSFNET was an intranet, because the NSFNET backbone admitted members only under a written Acceptable Use Policy restricted to research and education. The Internet admits anyone, and open admission is the one property that defines the Internet. Open admission came to the Internet from the commercial networks PSINet, AlterNet, and CERFnet at the Commercial Internet eXchange announced on March 25, 1991, and open admission did not come from the ARPANET or from the NSFNET. The ARPANET ended in 1990. The NSFNET backbone ended on April 30, 1995. The ARPANET, the NSFNET, and the Internet share the function of internetworking and share the word internet, and a shared function and a shared word are not a shared lineage. The Internet was born in 1991, and the Internet was not born from the ARPANET or from the NSFNET.

D2. intranet. A network, at any scale, in any geography, and under any protocol, whose members join by an owner’s permission. The word carries its own definition: intra means within, and an intranet is a network within a bounded and credentialed community, whether that community is one company’s offices or one government’s contractors spread across two continents. Scale does not convert an intranet into the Internet, geography does not, and protocol does not, because a gated network that adopts the optional protocols TCP/IP has changed its plumbing and not its admission policy; only open admission makes the Internet, and a research intranet is not the Internet. NSFNET and ARPANET are historical examples of intranets under this definition. Neither was the Internet, and neither became the Internet merely by being technically interconnected with other networks.

D3. internetworking. The technique of interconnecting distinct networks through gateways so that traffic originating on one can reach hosts on another. Internetworking among gated intranets was operating in production by 1975, when the gateway at University College London, developed and operated by Peter Kirstein’s group, of which Peter Higginson was a principal member, joined the ARPANET to the United Kingdom’s EPSS, an operation documented in the September 1975 paper of Peter L. Higginson and Andrew J. Hinchley, which recorded the working gateway while filing the Cerf and Kahn protocol as a future option rather than the operating method. Internetworking among gated intranets makes a lowercase internet, in the exact lowercase vocabulary of RFC 1983, and it never makes the capital-I Internet, because interconnecting two gated networks produces a larger gated system, not a public one. The credit for internetworking belongs to the engineers who built and operated the gateways; that credit does not extend to the birth of the Internet, which did not yet exist.

D4. ARPANET, also rendered DARPANET. The ARPA Network: one organization’s intranet, built, funded, owned, and access-controlled by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the United States Department of Defense, later renamed DARPA, from its commissioning in 1969 until its decommissioning in 1990. Its very name is a possessive, the agency’s initials welded onto the agency’s property, and the network’s renamings followed the owner’s renamings, as only an owned network’s can. Admission was by the owner’s authorization for the owner’s purposes, the Official Host Table of the Network Information Center at SRI, the register of the era’s hosts that preceded the optional protocol DNS, listed 235 hosts in May 1982 and 562 hosts in August 1983, the two counts in RFC 1296 of January 1992 that bracket the 1983 protocol cutover, and no member of the public could join it, buy from it, or sell across it on any day of its twenty-one years. The owner stated the network’s purpose in its own procurement instrument before the network existed: Request for Quotations No. DAHC15 69 Q 0002, issued July 29, 1968 by the Defense Supply Service-Washington of the Department of the Army for the Advanced Research Projects Agency under ARPA Order No. 1260, and signed by Thomas J. Scheblik, Deputy Director for Procurement, solicited the Interface Message Processors for the ARPA computer network, and its Statement of Work, Specifications of Interface Message Processors for the ARPA Computer Network, states that the Agency was forming the network “with the cooperation of its research contractors,” that the network’s potential lay in “making these advanced research computer systems available to users outside their own design circle,” and that the network itself was “a subject of study and experimentation,” while the Statement of Work’s nineteen pages and seven appendices contain no reference to war, to survivability, to attack, to command and control, or to any military mission. The design mission of the ARPANET was therefore resource sharing among the owner’s research contractors, stated by the owner in 1968, and the later recollections agree with the instrument: Charles Herzfeld, Director of ARPA from 1965 to 1967, stated that the ARPANET was not started to create a command and control system that would survive a nuclear attack; Vint Cerf recorded on the Internet Society’s internet-history list on September 1, 2009 that Larry Roberts confirmed the purpose of the ARPANET was resource sharing and that the nuclear resilience story came from Paul Baran’s earlier work; and the Internet Society’s own history, A Brief History of the Internet, calls that story a false rumor that arose from the unrelated RAND study. The wartime mission, command traffic surviving damaged links and destroyed nodes, belonged to the owner’s later internetting project, which Vint Cerf managed at DARPA and demonstrated by putting packet radios in Strategic Air Command aircraft, and the optional protocol TCP, specified in 1974 with military computer communication requirements as the stated primary focus of RFC 793 of September 1981, was designed for that mission and installed on this intranet by the owner’s directive in 1983. The ARPANET is not the Internet, and DARPANET is not the Internet: one organization’s intranet is not the publicly joinable network of networks. The ARPANET intranet was procured under Request for Quotations No. DAHC15 69 Q 0002 of July 29, 1968, ran from 1969, and carried its traffic for fourteen years, under the Network Control Program, an optional protocol first specified in RFC 33 of February 1970, before TCP was added to it on January 1, 1983; a protocol added to a working network fourteen years after the network was procured is an add-on to that network, not its birth.

D5. Flag day, January 1, 1983. A scheduled protocol cutover, from NCP to TCP/IP, planned within the ARPANET community for years and executed on the owner’s own plant: an intranet’s internal maintenance event, touching no member of the public because no member of the public was on the network before the cutover or after it. The protocol installed that day was commissioned by the same owner to weld its own three networks together, the terrestrial ARPANET, its mobile packet radio network, and its satellite network, crossing dissimilar media under a single owner without ever crossing an owner, so that traffic could survive battlefield destruction. The Internet’s own standards registry graded TCP “Recommended” and never “Required,” in RFC 1200 of April 1991 and RFC 2200 of June 1997, grades that bind only systems electing to implement the standard suite, and a protocol cutover on a gated intranet is not the birth of anything. The network the protocol was cut over onto had been procured on July 29, 1968 and running since 1969, fourteen years before that day, so the cutover added a protocol to an existing intranet and created no network.

D6. The Internet protocols, the optional protocols TCP and IP. Protocols are utilities whose messages the networks carry; they are not the networks, and they are not the Internet. Under these Governing Definitions, TCP and IP are optional protocols, and paragraphs D6.1 through D6.13 state the documents on which that definition rests and the judgment of Mark Nichols that completes it.

D6.1 The Internet’s own standards registry, issued first by the Internet Activities Board and later by the Internet Architecture Board, under the title IAB Official Protocol Standards and from RFC 1500 of August 1993 under the title Internet Official Protocol Standards, assigned a status to each listed protocol in twenty-two editions, from RFC 1083 of December 1988 through RFC 2400 of September 1998.

D6.2 Every one of those twenty-two editions lists TCP, the Transmission Control Protocol of RFC 793, at the status “Recommended”, printed “Rec” from RFC 1280 of March 1992 onward, and lists IP, the Internet Protocol of RFC 791, at the status “Required”, printed “Req” from RFC 1280 onward, and not one of the twenty-two editions lists TCP at the status “Required” in any of its tables.

D6.3 RFC 1200 of April 1991, issued by the Internet Activities Board with Jon Postel as editor, and RFC 2200 of June 1997, issued by the Internet Architecture Board with Jon Postel as editor, each define the status “Required” at section 4.2.1 in the words “A system must implement the required protocols”, define the status “Recommended” at section 4.2.2 in the words “A system should implement the recommended protocols”, and define the status “Elective” at section 4.2.3 in the words “A system may or may not implement an elective protocol”, so that by the registry’s own definitions TCP is a protocol that a system should implement and is not a protocol that a system must implement.

D6.4 RFC 1200 of April 1991 and RFC 2200 of June 1997 each open by stating that the edition “describes the state of standardization of protocols used in the Internet” as determined by its board, and each states that “Few protocols are required to be implemented in all systems” because of the variety of possible systems, gateways, terminal servers, workstations and multi-user hosts among them.

D6.5 RFC 1122, Requirements for Internet Hosts -- Communication Layers, edited by Robert Braden for the Internet Engineering Task Force in October 1989 and listed at the status “Required” in RFC 2200 of June 1997, states at its section 1.1.3 that “To communicate using the Internet system, a host must implement the layered set of protocols comprising the Internet protocol suite” and, in the next sentence, that “A host typically must implement at least one protocol from each layer”, so RFC 1122 binds a host that has chosen to communicate using the Internet system, and RFC 1122 requires of that host at least one transport protocol, not TCP.

D6.6 RFC 1122 of October 1989 states at its section 1.1.3 that “There are two primary transport layer protocols at present”, naming TCP and UDP, and that “the set of official Internet transport protocols may be expanded in the future”, states at its section 4.2.1 that “TCP is used by those applications needing reliable, connection-oriented transport service”, and states at its section 4.1.1 that “UDP is used by applications that do not require the level of service of TCP”, so RFC 1122 itself assigns TCP by the needs of the application.

D6.7 RFC 1200 of April 1991 and RFC 2200 of June 1997 each list, at section 6.3, Network-Specific Standard Protocols, the transmission of IP over each type of physical network, ARPANET, X.25, Ethernet, IEEE 802, FDDI and serial lines among them, at the status “Elective”, and each states that “it is elective to support any particular type of physical network” on which IP is transmitted.

D6.8 RFC 2500 of June 1999 prints no status for TCP or for IP, RFC 5000 of May 2008, the last edition of the registry, prints no status for TCP or for IP, and RFC 7100 of December 2013, written by Pete Resnick of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., obsoletes RFC 5000 and requests that RFC 5000, and therefore STD 1, be moved to Historic status, so the last status that the Internet’s own standards registry ever assigned to TCP is “Recommended”, in RFC 2400 of September 1998.

D6.9 The IP that the registry listed at the status “Required” is version 4 of the Internet Protocol, RFC 791, and the Internet Engineering Task Force standardized a second and separate Internet Protocol, version 6, in RFC 8200 of July 2017, STD 86, by S. Deering and R. Hinden. RFC 6540 of April 2012, BCP 177, titled IPv6 Support Required for All IP-Capable Nodes and written by W. George of Time Warner Cable, C. Donley of CableLabs, C. Liljenstolpe of Big Switch Networks and L. Howard of Time Warner Cable, advises that “IPv6 support is no longer considered optional”, cautions that the term “IP” has become “a generic that can mean IPv4 + IPv6, IPv6-only, or IPv4-only, depending on context and application”, and states that new and updated IP networking implementations “must not require IPv4 for proper and complete function”, so the Internet Engineering Task Force itself used the word optional for an Internet Protocol until April 2012, and the IP version that the registry listed at the status “Required” is, under the Best Current Practice of April 2012, a version that no new or updated implementation may require.

D6.10 The suite’s own members prove reliability is a per-application choice, because the optional protocols UDP of RFC 768, RTP of RFC 1889 of January 1996, which RFC 3550 of July 2003 obsoletes, and QUIC of RFC 9000 all decline TCP’s services while each remains a protocol of the Internet standards track.

D6.11 TCP is an evolutionary option, not a permanent fixture: it replaced NCP on the owner’s intranet in the 1983 cutover, UDP stood beside it from 1980 for applications that declined its services, RTP went around it in 1996 for media that could not wait for retransmission, and QUIC, published in May 2021, is displacing it now by moving reliability into a new protocol carried inside UDP datagrams; the protocols rotate while the Internet persists, and a layer whose occupants rotate is by definition not the thing itself.

D6.12 It is the stated judgment of Mark Nichols that both are optional utilities: TCP optional on the registry’s own grade, and IP optional as a specific protocol, because the registry’s “Required” grade is conditional conformance language that binds only systems electing to implement the standard suite, the election being made before the grade applies, as the words “To communicate using the Internet system” of RFC 1122 and the word optional that RFC 6540 applies to IPv6 both record, and because what internetworking requires is the addressing function, the label that says where a packet should go, while IP is one implementation of that function and not the function itself.

D6.13 Hence the rebrand coinages stated at marknichols.com/internet-protocols/: TCP is better named ESFRP, the Endpoint Segment Failure Retry Protocol, and IP is better named ALP, the Address Label Protocol. The postmen are not the post office, and the protocols are not the Internet.

D7. NSFNET. The National Science Foundation’s backbone, 1986 to 1995: a federation of research intranets joined into a lowercase internet under a written Acceptable Use Policy that restricted carriage to research and education and barred commercial traffic. The dismantling is dated by the operator of record, Merit Network: the replacement architecture was awarded early in 1994, the very high speed Backbone Network Service to MCI and the Network Access Points to Sprint, MFS Datanet, and Bellcore representing Ameritech and PacBell; member networks began moving off in November 1994; the backbone was terminated on April 30, 1995; and the regional networks passed principally to the commercial carriers internetMCI and SprintLink, which, in Merit’s own words, absorbed the NSFNET regionals as their customers. The NSFNET is not the Internet: a backbone admission-screened under a written Acceptable Use Policy restricted to research and education is a gated network, and a gated network is not the publicly joinable network of networks.

D8. The World Wide Web. An application design made by many persons inside and outside CERN, announced publicly on August 6, 1991, three programs of CERN's World Wide Web software, the line-mode client, the basic server and the library of common code, released into the public domain by CERN on April 30, 1993, with NCSA Mosaic released in 1993 putting a graphical browser in front of it. A free application is not an open network: until April 30, 1995, the Web’s principal carriage was the gated research intranets beneath it, research-only carriage under the written policy, and the calendar states the dependency exactly, because CERN's three programs of Web software went public on April 30, 1993, and the gated research fabric beneath most of its hosts was absorbed into the public Internet two years later to the day, on April 30, 1995. The name World Wide Web is a label for a large body of technology in the public domain, made by many persons and bodies inside and outside CERN, as F32.4 of this page states. The World Wide Web is not the Internet: the Web is an application using the Internet platform, and the application is not the platform.

D9. The birth of the Internet, and the absorption. The capital-I Internet was born in 1991, when PSINet, AlterNet under UUNET, and CERFnet, independently operated commercial networks of the registry lineage, established the Commercial Internet eXchange, a settlement-free router interconnection with open admission and no purpose-screening policy, as recorded in the Federal Communications Commission working paper The Digital Handshake by Michael Kende and as announced by the three networks’ operators themselves, General Atomics, Performance Systems International, Inc., and UUNET Technologies, Inc., in their release of March 25, 1991, which states that “The CIX agreement provides for all customers of AlterNet, CERFnet and PSINet to exchange Internet traffic directly, regardless of which network the customer obtains service from, and at no additional cost” and that the three “are not subject to government mandated “acceptable use” restrictions on their traffic,” the release being preserved as message 441 of the com-priv archive at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and seated at F52 of this page; the agreement’s own text and its execution date are still sought, and the ruling stands on the dated announcement, the year, the parties, and the terms until a dated earlier instrument of the same lineage is produced. April 30, 1995 is not the Internet’s birthday; it is the absorption: the day the last written admission policy over the general-purpose research backbone died with the NSFNET, the regional networks passed principally to internetMCI and SprintLink, and the populations that had lived behind the gate joined the Internet that had existed without them since 1991. Being born is not the same as being built, and the Modern Internet, publicly accessible, eCommerce native, media streaming native, and QoS native, was built from 1996 to 1997 on executed documents: the Telecommunications Act signed February 8, 1996, autonomous system AS6553 issued August 29, 1996 by the InterNIC, the $300,000 Cisco Systems agreement of November 1996 to host cisco.com on Digital Island’s Tier-0 network, and production service in the first quarter of 1997, with Cisco Systems, Stanford University, and Visa International as the first customers in sequence.

D10. The Modern Internet. The Internet changed from the legacy Internet to the Modern Internet on the day its internetworking changed from best effort to deterministic, and that day is November 1, 1996, the Effective Date of the Cisco Systems Remote Data Services Agreement, signed for Digital Island, Inc. by Mark Nichols, Director, Global Networks, on November 7, 1996 and for Cisco Systems, Inc. by Hervé Goguely, Director, Global Service Management, on November 8, 1996, under which Cisco Systems became the first customer to buy a contractually guaranteed global service, a network segment exclusively its own with secure transaction services and sub-300 milliseconds round trip, on the architecture Mark Nichols hand-drew in June 1996, redrew as DIGITAL ISLAND DRAFT.1 in July 1996 and DRAFT.2 in October 1996, and registered as AS6553, issued to Digital Island, Inc. on August 29, 1996. An evolution, not a synonym. The capital-I Internet born in 1991 and made general-purpose by the absorption of April 30, 1995 was public but bare: a network anyone could join, and nothing commerce-grade could yet depend on, because open admission supplies members and does not supply performance. The Modern Internet is what that public network evolved into when global commerce was engineered onto it: the enabling of the globalization of eCommerce, of streaming media, and of Quality of Service under signed and enforceable terms, built on Digital Island’s Tier-0 network under autonomous system AS6553 with contractually enforced sub-300-millisecond round-trip performance across major markets, carrying the Merchant Transport product category coined in September 1996, on the architecture designed by Mark Nichols as co-founder and chief architect, the record standing at marknichols.com/architect-of-the-modern-internet/, marknichols.com/merchant-transport/, and marknichols.com/tier-0/. The evolution is dated by the executed record and by the customers who ran on AS6553 in sequence: Cisco Systems in November 1996, Stanford University in 1997, Visa International in the second quarter of 1997, E*TRADE under its global data distribution agreement with Digital Island dated August 1, 1997, as Digital Island’s S-1 records it, Charles Schwab in 1998, and MasterCard in March 1999; Telefónica Data formed a global IP alliance with Digital Island on April 26, 1999, Sun Microsystems and Inktomi invested in Digital Island in December 1999, Microsoft, Intel, and Compaq invested in Digital Island in June 2000, and CERNET, the China Education and Research Network, peered with Digital Island under the contract signed in Beijing on February 25, 1998 and was never a customer. The Modern Internet is therefore dated 1996 to 1997 in executed documents, and the word modern means publicly accessible, commerce-grade, streaming-capable, and QoS-governed, none of which the newborn network possessed.

D11. Usage. On every page of this site, Internet with a capital I means the publicly joinable network of the registry lineage born in 1991 and nothing else; internet in lowercase means any interconnection of networks, including gated ones; gated systems are named what they were, research intranets, whatever their date; and any page, headline, plaque, or biography that assigns the birth of the Internet to 1969, 1974, or 1983 is measured against these definitions and fails, because on each of those dates every network in the claim admitted its members by permission, and any account that assigns the birth to April 30, 1995 is measured against these definitions and fails as well, because on that date the Internet already existed and what died was the gate beside it. And on every page of this site, “Required” as a registry grade appears only in quotation marks with its condition stated in the same sentence, that it binds only systems electing to implement the standard suite, except within D6 of this page, where D6.12 states that condition once for every quotation of the registry in D6.1 through D6.11; this site’s own prose never calls any Internet protocol required, because at the level of Internet membership there are no required protocols, only elected ones, and an unconditional “required” applied to an Internet protocol is the registry’s conditional conformance label promoted into a membership law that no document states.

D12. Contemporary primary-source documents control over retrospective accounts, institutional narratives, biographies, media summaries, machine-generated responses, and personal recollections.

D13. Any finding in this record may be amended upon production of contemporaneous documentary evidence demonstrating a materially earlier, later, or contrary fact.