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

Of the 85 citations in the Wikipedia article Al Gore and information technology, 38 carry the sentence that cites them, 21 carry it in part, 3 do not carry it and 23 cannot be checked, and the article places inside a quotation of a Scientific American article of May 1993 a sentence crediting Gore with the creation of the Internet that the readable part of the source does not carry.

Preamble: I audit the Wikipedia article Al Gore and information technology footnote by footnote, opening the source that each footnote cites and reading it against the sentence that cites it. This page is the companion of Disagreement 97 in the standing index of the series, Disagreements of Published Claims | Network, Not Protocol, and the article lines cited on this page are the numbered lines of Exhibit A of Wikipedia Al Gore and Information Technology: Disagreements | Network, Not Protocol. The method and the five grades are the same as on Wikipedia Robert Cailliau: Reference Audit | Network, Not Protocol.

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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 audits, the method of the audit, and the grades it assigns.

0.1 The article audited on this page is Al Gore and information technology of the English Wikipedia at revision 1385267926 of November 12, 2026, saved by the account GreenC bot, which was the revision in force on November 14, 2026. Unit 0.1 of Disagreement 97 records that the revision of the text reproduced in Exhibit A is unknown, and this page compared lines 47 through 49 and lines 160 through 163 of Exhibit A with revision 1385267926 and found them the same. The article carries 75 numbered footnotes, which it cites 85 times. This page read the list of footnotes, the links of each footnote and the position of each citation in revision 1385267926 through Wikipedia's own public interface on November 14, 2026.

0.2 This page audited each footnote on November 14, 2026, by opening the source at the link the footnote gives, at the archived copy that the footnote names where the original is gone, and, where neither reaches the source, at another archived copy or another copy of the same document, which the unit that grades it identifies. Of the 75 footnotes, 57 were read in full or retrieved in full and read at the passages that bear on the sentence they support after a search of the whole text, 2 were read only in part, and 16 could not be read, and the unit that grades each footnote states which. Several of the sources had also been read for Wikipedia High Performance Computing Act of 1991: Reference Audit | Network, Not Protocol or for Wikipedia Leonard Kleinrock: Reference Audit | Network, Not Protocol, and the units that grade them say so. The scanned report Science in the National Interest of August 1994 was read by optical character recognition of its pages.

0.3 Each citation receives one of five grades. Supported means that the source carries the sentence in its own words. Partial means that the source carries part of the sentence and not the rest. Not supported means that the source was read and does not carry the sentence. Uncheckable means that the citation cannot be followed to a readable source. Unread means that the source was not read for this page, and no citation of this article received that grade.

0.4 The sources are quoted on this page in short fragments, and the rest of what each source says is stated in the words of this page. The sentences of the article are quoted from Exhibit A of Disagreement 97. Exhibit A omits the article's references, so the footnotes are named on this page by their numbers in revision 1385267926 and not by a line of the exhibit. Where a site is blocked to this page's reader or stopped this page at a gate for automated visitors, this page stopped there and did not open a copy of the same page elsewhere, and the unit says so.

1.0 Each of the 75 footnotes of the article is graded at each sentence that cites it.

1.1 Footnote 1 cites Sarah Miles, "A Man, a Plan, a Challenge", Wired, January 30, 1998, for the quotation of lines 14 and 15. The site wired.com is blocked to this page's reader, and the footnote names no archived copy, so the citation at line 15 is graded Uncheckable.

1.2 Footnotes 2 and 20 cite Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray, Computer: A History of the Information Machine (1996), at page 298 for line 16 and at page 283 for line 54. Neither footnote gives a link, and both citations are graded Uncheckable.

1.3 Footnote 3 cites Thomas C. Greene, "Net builders Kahn, Cerf recognise Al Gore", The Register, October 2, 2000, in the copy archived on September 19, 2008 that the footnote names. The page, fully read, reproduces the essay "Al Gore and the Internet" of Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf "unedited and uncut". At line 21, the block quotation of lines 18 through 21 matches the essay, except that the essay writes "high speed" and the article's ellipsis at line 19 drops the sentence on the start of Kahn and Cerf's work in 1973, and the citation is graded Supported. At line 131, the words of lines 130 and 131 match the essay, and the citation is graded Supported. The essay names the statute of 1991 the "High Performance Computing and Communications Act".

1.4 Footnote 4 cites Gregory Gromov, "Roads and Crossroads of Internet History", chapter 1, netvalley.com, in the copy archived on August 24, 2016 that the footnote names. The page was retrieved in full and searched, and its Gore passages were read. It gives the entry "24 Jun 1986: Albert Gore (D-TN) introduce S 2594 / Supercomputer Network Study Act of 1986", and the citation at line 22 is graded Supported.

1.5 Footnote 5 cites the Computer History Museum page "Internet History 1990's" in the copy archived on July 10, 2007 that the footnote names. The page, retrieved in full and searched, says that in 1991 Congress "passes the Gore Bill" to create the National Research and Education Network, and the citation at line 23, which sits after the words "The Gore Bill", is graded Supported. The page does not give the statute's name.

1.6 Footnote 6 cites the report Toward a National Research Network of 1988 at a copy archived on May 18, 2007, and this page read the report through its DOI, 10.17226/10334, at the front matter for Wikipedia High Performance Computing Act of 1991: Reference Audit | Network, Not Protocol and at pages 38 through 40 for Wikipedia Leonard Kleinrock: Reference Audit | Network, Not Protocol. The title page names the Computer Science and Technology Board and Leonard Kleinrock as chairman, and the preface does not name Gore and does not say that the report was submitted to Congress. At line 23, the report of 1988 chaired by Kleinrock is supported, and the submission to Congress and Gore's hearing of the report are not, so the citation is graded Partial.

1.7 Footnote 7 cites "A Brief History of the Internet" of the Internet Society, by Leiner, Cerf, Clark, Kahn, Kleinrock, Lynch, Postel, Roberts and Wolff, in the copy archived on June 4, 2007 that the footnote names. The paper was retrieved in full and searched, and its passages on the report and the ARPANET were read. It says that a National Research Council committee chaired by Kleinrock produced in 1988 a report "commissioned by NSF" and that the report "was influential on then Senator Al Gore", and it does not use the words "predecessor" or "creators" and does not name Congress. At line 23, the citation is graded Partial. Kleinrock is one of the authors of the paper.

1.8 Footnote 8 cites Leonard Kleinrock's paper at lk.cs.ucla.edu/PS/paper224.pdf in the copy archived on July 22, 2007 that the footnote names. The file is a paper of 13 pages titled "The Internet rules of engagement: then and now", and its text was extracted in full and searched, and its Gore passage and references were read. Lines 25 through 27 of the article match the paper, except that the article's quotation reads "President George H.W Bush" where the paper reads "President George Bush" and reads "Act of 1991" where the paper reads "act of 1991", without brackets. The citation at line 27 is graded Partial, because the quotation is altered without marking.

1.9 Footnote 9 names a chapter by Gary Chapman and Marc Rotenberg in a book edited by Johnson and Nissenbaum, Computers, Ethics, & Social Values (1995), pages 628 through 644, and links the CPSR Newsletter of Summer 1993, volume 11, number 2. The newsletter was retrieved in full and searched, and the article of Chapman and Rotenberg in it, "The National Information Infrastructure: A Public Interest Opportunity", was read at its passages on the network and the highway. It says that Congress passed and President Bush signed the High Performance Computing and Communications Act in late 1991, and it attributes to Gore the phrase "digital highways". At line 28, the source does not say that the bill led to the National Information Infrastructure, does not give the date of December 9 and does not attribute to Gore the phrase "information superhighway", so the citation is graded Partial.

1.10 Footnote 10 cites President George H. W. Bush, "Remarks on Signing the High-Performance Computing Act of 1991", December 9, 1991, in the copy archived on January 10, 2008, which this page read in full for Wikipedia High Performance Computing Act of 1991: Reference Audit | Network, Not Protocol. The remarks carry "To unlock the secrets of DNA", foreign markets through a new GATT round and a North American free-trade agreement, and the work of government, industry and academia together, and the citation at line 29 is graded Supported. The remarks do not name Gore.

1.11 Footnotes 11 and 12 cite Gore's essay "Infrastructure for the Global Village", Scientific American, September 1991, at pages 150 and 152, for the two quotations of line 31. Neither footnote gives a link, and both citations are graded Uncheckable.

1.12 Footnote 13 cites the page "NCSA Mosaic -- September 10, 1993 Demo" at totic.org, and footnote 14 cites the Living Internet page "Mosaic -- The First Global Web Browser" in the copy archived on July 2, 2007, both read in full for Wikipedia High Performance Computing Act of 1991: Reference Audit | Network, Not Protocol. Both pages carry Mosaic of 1993, and neither names the Act, the Gore Bill or any funding by it, so both citations at line 33 are graded Partial.

1.13 Footnote 15 cites Keith Perine, The Industry Standard, October 23, 2000, in the copy archived on May 27, 2005 that the footnote names, read at the passage and read in full at another capture for Wikipedia High Performance Computing Act of 1991: Reference Audit | Network, Not Protocol. The article carries the words of lines 35 and 36, with double quotation marks where the article prints single ones, and the citation at line 36 is graded Supported.

1.14 Footnote 16 cites William Broad, "Clinton to Promote High Technology, With Gore in Charge", The New York Times, November 10, 1992, at lines 39, 40, 42 and 43. The site nytimes.com is blocked to this page's reader, so the citations at line 39, line 40, line 42 and line 43 are graded Uncheckable.

1.15 Footnote 17 cites William Clinton and Al Gore, "Technology for America's Economic Growth, A New Direction to Build Economic Strength", February 22, 1993, in the archived PDF of 41 pages, whose text was extracted in full and searched for each technology named at lines 41 and 42. The report carries biotechnology, machine tools, magnetic levitation, a high-speed fiber-optic network and "advanced supercomputers and computer networks", and it does not carry robotics, smart roads, digital imaging or data storage. At line 44, the report is the report named, and the citation is graded Partial, because the initiatives of lines 41 and 42 that cite footnote 16 are carried by this report only in part. The report also says that the information superhighways were "created by legislation introduced and steered to passage by Vice President Gore when he served in the Senate."

1.16 Footnote 18 cites Edmund Andrews, The New York Times, September 15, 1993. The site nytimes.com is blocked to this page's reader, so the citation at line 45 is graded Uncheckable.

1.17 Footnote 19 cites Gary Stix, "Gigabit Gestalt", Scientific American, May 1993, at the preview of the issue in the copy archived on March 17, 2008 that the footnote names. The preview, fully read, carries the words of line 47 on a "distinct statement about where the new administration stands on the matter of technology". The rest of the article of three pages is behind a paywall, and its DOI, 10.1038/scientificamerican0593-122, was not read. The sentences of lines 48 and 49 are not in the preview, and the citation at line 49 is graded Partial. Section 2.0 records what line 49 places inside the quotation.

1.18 Footnote 21 cites Howard Rheingold, "Afterword to the 1994 Edition", The Virtual Community (2000), page 395, and footnote 31 cites the same afterword at pages 398 and 399. Neither footnote gives a link, so the citations of footnote 21 at line 57 and line 78 and of footnote 31 at line 73 are graded Uncheckable.

1.19 Footnote 22 cites "Science in the National Interest", Executive Office of the President, Office of Science and Technology Policy, August 1994, in the archived ERIC copy, a scan of 37 pages that this page read by optical character recognition at the cover, the title page, the acknowledgments and the contents. The title page names President William J. Clinton and Vice President Albert Gore, Jr., and the chapters are "Setting Our National Goals" and "Reaching Our Goals", and the citation at line 58 is graded Supported. The word submitted at line 58 is the article's.

1.20 Footnote 23 cites Gore's remarks to the Superhighway Summit at Royce Hall, UCLA, January 11, 1994, and footnote 24 cites his remarks to the International Telecommunication Union of March 21, 1994, each in an archived copy that was retrieved in full and searched and read at the opening. The second asks the Union "to help create a Global Information Infrastructure". Both citations at line 59 are graded Supported. The archived page of footnote 24 carries the page title "13-Oct-1994".

1.21 Footnote 25 cites the transcript of the White House, Office of the Vice President, of January 13, 1994, of Gore's appearance on the CompuServe Information Service, in the copy archived on May 23, 2007. The transcript, retrieved in full and searched, has the moderator William F. Allman of U.S. News & World Report call the event the first appearance of a Vice President "in a live, online conference". The words that line 60 quotes, "became the first U.S. vice president to hold a live interactive news conference on an international computer network", are not in the transcript, and the citation is graded Partial.

1.22 Footnote 26 cites Gore's "Foreword by Vice President Al Gore to The Internet Companion" in the copy archived on June 16, 2007 that the footnote names. The foreword, fully read, carries the quotation of lines 63 through 67 word for word, except that the article adds a comma after "in the early 1980s", and the citation at line 67 is graded Supported. The foreword welcomes "the revised edition" of the book, which bears on the words first edition at line 61, a line that carries no footnote.

1.23 Footnote 27 cites the page "Welcome to the White House" at clinton1.nara.gov in the copy archived on June 6, 2007. The page, fully read, is a single image map with links and carries no text and no date, so the citation at line 68 is graded Partial: the page is the archived home page of the first Clinton White House site, and it does not carry the date of October 21, 1994.

1.24 Footnote 28 cites the About.com article "The Clinton White House Web Site: Part 2: Preserving the Clinton White House Web site" of January 2001 in the copy archived on July 22, 2011 that the footnote names. The article, fully read, lists four versions of the site, the first from July 29, 1994 through August 25, 1995 and the last from July 21, 2000 through January 20, 2001. At line 68, the source dates the first version from July 29, 1994 and not from October 21, 1994, and the citation is graded Not supported. At line 69, the four versions and the last version of 2000 are carried, and the citation is graded Supported.

1.25 Footnote 29 cites the page "Welcome to the White House" at clinton5.nara.gov in the copy archived on June 23, 2007, which was retrieved in full and read at the opening. It is the archived home page of the last Clinton White House site, with items of January 16 and 17, 2001, and it carries no count of versions and no launch date, so the citation at line 69 is graded Partial.

1.26 Footnote 30 cites the About.com article "The Clinton White House Web Site: Part 1" in the copy archived on January 18, 2017 that the footnote names. The article, retrieved in full and read, carries the quotation of lines 70 through 72, with no comma after "court system", and the citation at line 72 is graded Supported. The article says that the first White House Web site "was launched on Oct. 21, 1994", and section 2.0 records the conflict between the two parts of the article.

1.27 Footnote 32 cites the statement of the Vice President of February 4, 1994 on encryption, in the archive of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. The statement, fully read, carries the words quoted at lines 74 and 75, with no comma after "law and order issue", and the citation at line 75 is graded Supported. The document is a statement, which line 74 calls a memo.

1.28 Footnote 33 cites the Administration Statement on Commercial Encryption Policy of July 12, 1996 in the archive of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which this page's reader returned only to its first 12,000 characters, so the source was read in part. The part read describes a global key management infrastructure in which trusted private parties "will hold spare keys" and says that officials were working with other nations. The reason stated at line 77, the government's need for access to encrypted data from other countries, is not in the part read, and the citation is graded Partial.

1.29 Footnote 34 cites the press release of the National Research Council of May 30, 1996, which, fully read, reports a committee chaired by Kenneth W. Dam and calls the government's support of escrowed encryption "inappropriate now". Footnote 35 cites "The Risks of Key Recovery, Key Escrow, and Trusted Third-Party Encryption" of 1998 by Abelson, Anderson, Bellovin, Benaloh, Blaze, Diffie, Gilmore, Neumann, Rivest, Schiller and Schneier, retrieved in full and read at its abstract and introduction. Both citations at line 78 are graded Supported. Footnote 36 cites Edmund L. Andrews, The New York Times, October 9, 1997, for the European Commission, and nytimes.com is blocked to this page's reader, so that citation at line 78 is graded Uncheckable.

1.30 Footnote 37 cites the page "The Clipper Chip" in the archive of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which, fully read, records the announcement of April 16, 1993 and the adoption of February 4, 1994, "supported by Vice President Gore". The page says nothing of the initiatives failing to gain acceptance by consumers or support from industry, and the citation at line 79 is graded Not supported.

1.31 Footnote 38 cites the release of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility of January 27, 1994 and the letter of cryptographers to President Clinton of January 24, 1994, which, fully read, urged the President "to abandon the controversial Clipper encryption proposal", and the citation at line 80 is graded Supported.

1.32 Footnote 39 cites Mike Godwin, "Rendering Unto CESA", Reason, May 1, 2000, retrieved in full and searched and read at its passages on Clipper and key escrow. Godwin writes that by 1996 the administration had abandoned the Clipper Chip "as such" but "continued to lobby both at home and abroad" for key escrow standards. At line 81, the abandonment of the Clipper Chip by 1996 is supported, and the abandonment of key escrow by 1996 is contradicted by the source, so the citation is graded Partial.

1.33 Footnote 40 cites Al Gore, "No More Information Haves and Have-Nots", Billboard, October 22, 1994, in the copy archived on September 29, 2007 that the footnote names. The page, fully read, carries lines 85 through 91 word for word, and the citation at line 91 is graded Supported. Billboard notes that the piece is excerpted from Gore's speech at the National Association of Black Owned Broadcasters convention in September, and line 83, which carries no footnote, calls it an article and gives its title as "No More Information Have and Have Nots".

1.34 Footnote 41 cites Steve Rubenstein, "Clinton, Gore in Concord Today for NetDay", San Francisco Chronicle, March 9, 1996, in the copy archived on April 20, 2001 that the footnote names. The article, fully read, reports that Clinton and Gore would log on from Ygnacio Valley High School in Concord in the drive to wire California schools, and the citation at line 93 is graded Supported. The article was written on the morning of the event.

1.35 Footnote 42 cites the remarks of President Clinton to the Concord community on NetDay, March 9, 1996, in the copy archived on May 12, 2007, retrieved in full and read at the quoted passages. The remarks carry both quotations of lines 94 through 96, and the citation at line 96 is graded Supported.

1.36 Footnote 43 cites the "Statement by the Vice President about NetDay" at clinton4.nara.gov in the copy archived on June 9, 2011, which, fully read, carries both quotations of lines 97 and 98, and the citation at line 98 is graded Supported. The page carries no date.

1.37 Footnote 44 cites a press release of the United States Department of Education of April 28, 1998, "Gore, Riley, and Kennard Honor NetDay Volunteers". The footnote gives no link, and the citation at line 99 is graded Uncheckable.

1.38 Footnote 45 cites "Picture This: Tipper Gore, Photojournalist" of 24 Hours in Cyberspace in the copy archived on February 13, 2008, which, fully read, carries the date of February 8, 1996 and Tipper Gore's work as one of the event's photojournalists and does not give a count of 150 photographers. The citation at line 101 is graded Partial.

1.39 Footnote 46 cites the table of contents of the Earthwatch section of 24 Hours in Cyberspace, which, fully read, links an essay without naming its author, and the citation at line 102 is graded Partial. Footnote 47 cites the "Essay by Al Gore" of the same site, which, fully read, carries lines 103 through 106 word for word, except that the article adds a comma after "to improve their world", and the citation at line 106 is graded Supported. The article's ellipsis at line 104 omits several paragraphs.

1.40 Footnote 48 cites the release of the Office of the Vice President of July 31, 1998, "Vice President Gore Announces New Steps Toward an Electronic Bill of Rights", in the copy of the Tech Law Journal, retrieved in full and searched. It carries both quotations of lines 108 and 109, spoken at an event in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, which line 108 calls a speech, and the citation at line 109 is graded Supported.

1.41 Footnote 49 cites the NASA release "Earth-Viewing Satellite Would Focus On Educational, Scientific Benefits" of March 1998 at ScienceDaily, which, fully read, describes an orbit about a million miles from Earth where the pull of the Sun and the Earth cancel, and does not carry the name Triana, the name L1, the figure 1.5 million km or the words permanently mounted. The citation at line 111 is graded Partial.

1.42 Footnote 50 cites the page "Digital Earth History" of the 5th International Symposium on Digital Earth in the copy archived on February 9, 2008, which, retrieved in full, credits the term Digital Earth to Gore's speech prepared for the California Science Center on January 31, 1998, and the citation at line 112 is graded Supported. Footnote 51 cites Jane Black, "Al Gore: Waiting in the wings", BBC News, January 27, 1998, which, fully read, does not mention Digital Earth and predates the speech, and the citation at line 112 is graded Not supported.

1.43 Footnote 52 cites the CNN transcript of Late Edition of March 9, 1999 in the copy archived on September 17, 2008 that the footnote names, read at the exchange and read for Wikipedia High Performance Computing Act of 1991: Reference Audit | Network, Not Protocol. The transcript carries lines 116 through 123, and the citation at line 123 is graded Supported; the article begins the quotation at "I'll be offering" without marking the words "Well, I will be offering" that precede it. Footnote 53 cites the live CNN address of the same transcript, which returned the notice "Content Unavailable For Legal Reasons", and the footnote names no archived copy, so the citation at line 124 is graded Uncheckable.

1.44 Footnote 54 cites the Snopes page "Did Al Gore Say 'I Invented the Internet'?", fully read, which says that the legend arose from "critics and pundits" who altered Gore's statement and stripped it of context, and which names editorials and not comedians. The citation at line 125 is graded Partial.

1.45 Footnote 55 cites the message of Vinton Cerf to the nettime list of September 29, 2000, "Al Gore and the Internet", which, read, carries the sentence quoted at line 126, and the citation at line 126 is graded Supported.

1.46 Footnote 56 cites Philip Agre, "Who Invented "Invented"?: Tracing the Real Story of the "Al Gore Invented the Internet" Hoax", Red Rock Eater Digest, October 17, 2000, in the copy archived on June 3, 2004, retrieved in full and searched, which traces the story to three Wired News articles of March 11, 15 and 23, 1999, and the citation at line 127 is graded Supported. Footnote 57 cites Scott Rosenberg, "Did Gore invent the Internet?", Salon, October 5, 2000, in the copy archived on July 24, 2008, retrieved in full and searched, which reports Agre's tracing of the story to Wired News, and the citation at line 127 is graded Supported. At line 131, the Salon article reports that Cerf and Kahn were defending Gore and does not carry the sentences quoted at lines 130 and 131, and the citation is graded Partial.

1.47 Footnote 58 cites Eric Boehlert, "Wired Owes Al Gore an Apology", The Huffington Post, in the copy archived on July 14, 2007, retrieved and searched. The column says that Wired News helped create the myth that Gore claimed to have invented the Internet, and the citation at line 127 is graded Supported. The page reads "Posted April 28, 2006", and the footnote gives April 26, 2008.

1.48 Footnote 59 cites Ben Smith, "Iraq Media Guy Rebuilds Qatar At the Garden", The New York Observer, October 26, 2003, in the copy archived on January 24, 2010, and footnote 60 cites Harvey Rice, "A war story I wish I'd written", in the copy archived on November 12, 2004, each retrieved and searched. Both say that Jim Wilkinson, who had worked for Congressman Dick Armey, helped promote the notion that Gore claimed to have invented the Internet, and both citations at line 128 are graded Supported. Both sources capitalize Internet in the words that the article quotes in lowercase, and the footnote of the Observer gives October 27, 2003. Footnote 61 cites Catalina Camia, The Dallas Morning News, May 30, 1999, page 8.A, with no link, and the citation at line 128 is graded Uncheckable.

1.49 Footnote 62 cites Cal Fussman, "What I've Learned: Vint Cerf", Esquire, in the copy archived on September 18, 2008, which carries lines 132 through 137 word for word, and the citation at line 137 is graded Supported. The source's headline calls Vinton Cerf "Creator of the Internet", and its page title calls him "the Father of the Internet".

1.50 Footnote 63 cites Christopher Seward, "Al Gore in 'Internet Hall of Fame'", Atlanta Journal-Constitution, April 24, 2012, in the copy archived on July 1, 2012, whose article was fully read. It quotes Newt Gingrich's speech of 2000 to the American Political Science Association from "In all fairness" through "we got to an Internet", and the quotation ends there. The rest of line 140 after those words, through "began to actually happen", is not in the source, and the citation at line 140 is graded Partial.

1.51 Footnote 64 cites the CNN transcript of the Late Edition tenth anniversary special of July 6, 2008, retrieved in full and searched and read at the Gore segment. Lines 142 through 145 match the transcript, except that the article's quotation reads "taking the initiative in creating the Internet" where the transcript reads "taking the initiative and creating the Internet", without brackets, and line 142 drops Blitzer's opening words without an ellipsis. The citation at line 145 is graded Partial.

1.52 Footnote 65 cites "Gore Does Dave", CBS News, September 14, 2000, in the copy archived on May 3, 2007, whose article was read. It carries the list of rejected campaign slogans read by Gore and number 9, "Remember, America, I gave you the Internet, and I can take it away!", and the citation at line 148 is graded Supported.

1.53 Footnote 66 cites "Webby Awards not laughing at Gore's contribution to Net", USA Today, May 5, 2005. The live page returned a notice that access requires a TollBit token, a gate for automated readers, and the footnote names no archived copy, so the citations at line 149 and line 170 are graded Uncheckable. Footnote 67 cites David Carr, "Accepting a Webby? Brevity, Please", The New York Times, June 8, 2005, which the footnote attributes to the American Broadcasting Company, and nytimes.com is blocked to this page's reader, so the citations at line 149, line 151 and line 170 are graded Uncheckable.

1.54 Footnote 68 cites "Al's Bio" at algore.com in the copy archived on June 13, 2008 that the footnote names. The page, fully read, calls Gore "A member of the Board of Directors of Apple Computer, Inc.", and the citation at line 154 is graded Supported.

1.55 Footnote 69 cites Alan Sayre, "Al Gore Buying Int'l News Channel", CBS News. The article, fully read, is dated May 4, 2004, which the footnote gives as May 4, 2005, and it carries the three quotations of line 157, and the citation is graded Supported. The article also reports the purchase of Newsworld International from Vivendi Universal Entertainment by Gore's company INdTV Holdings and names Joel Hyatt as chief executive, which bears on line 156, a line that carries no footnote.

1.56 Footnote 70 cites the press release of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences on the 59th Primetime Emmy Awards, dated September 16, 2007, in the PDF archived on September 26, 2007 that the footnote names. The release of 11 pages was extracted in full and searched, and it lists among the awards of the telecast of September 16, 2007 the award for Outstanding Creative Achievement in Interactive Television to Current TV for CurrentTV.com. At line 159, the date, the award and the winner are supported, and the words "for its use of online technologies with television" are not in the release, so the citation is graded Partial.

1.57 Footnote 71 cites the ThinkProgress post "Al Gore wins Emmy for Current TV." of September 16, 2007. The live address returned an access-denied error, and the footnote names no archived copy, so this page read the copy archived on January 10, 2008. The post and its transcript carry Gore's words of lines 160 through 163, and the citation at line 163 is graded Supported. In the transcript, Tom Anderson of MySpace introduces Current TV as "Founded in 2005 by Al Gore and Joel Hyatt".

1.58 Footnote 72 cites Al Gore, The Assault on Reason (Penguin Press, 2007), page 270, with no link, and the citation at line 166 is graded Uncheckable.

1.59 Footnote 73 cites the Cisco release "Vice President Albert Gore Accepts Cisco Circle Award", June 23, 1993, in the copy archived on February 24, 2007 that the footnote names. The release, read, carries the words quoted at line 168, with a lowercase "in" where the article capitalizes it, and the citation at line 168 is graded Supported. The release says that John Morgridge, President and Chief Executive Officer of Cisco Systems, presented the award on June 21, 1993.

1.60 Footnote 74 cites the page of past recipients of the Computerworld Honors Program in the copy archived on February 24, 2008 that the footnote names. The page, retrieved in full and searched, lists for 1998 "ALBERT GORE, JR., Vice President, United States of America" with the Toshiba America Leadership Award for Education, and the citation at line 169 is graded Supported.

1.61 Footnote 75 cites the release of the International Academy of Television Arts & Sciences of November 19, 2007 in the copy archived on March 7, 2008 that the footnote names. The release, retrieved in full and read at its Gore passages, says that the International Emmy Founders Award was presented by Robert De Niro to Gore for his role in launching Current TV and for his effort on global warming, and the citation at line 172 is graded Supported.

2.0 The article places in a quotation of 1993 a sentence crediting Gore with the creation of the Internet, alters four other quotations, and dates the first White House site against the source it cites.

2.1 At line 49, the article closes its quotation of Gary Stix's article of May 1993 with the sentence "Although Gore is most famous for his political career and environmental work, he is also noted for his creation of the" followed by the word Internet printed in lowercase. The readable preview of the article at footnote 19 does not carry the sentence.

2.2 Four other quotations differ from their sources without marking. At line 25, the article's quotation of Kleinrock's paper adds "H.W" and capitalizes "Act". At line 60, the quoted words are not the words of the transcript of January 13, 1994. At line 140, the quotation of Newt Gingrich runs past the end of the quotation in the source. At line 144, the quotation of Wolf Blitzer reads "in creating" where the transcript of July 6, 2008 reads "and creating".

2.3 At line 68, the article dates the first White House site to October 21, 1994 and cites part 2 of the About.com article, which dates the first version from July 29, 1994, and an archived page that carries no date. Part 1 of the same article, footnote 30, cited only at line 72, gives October 21, 1994.

2.4 Philip Agre, at footnote 56, writes that the Associated Press and The Washington Post "falsely state that the Internet was originally called the ARPANET and date it to 1969". At line 23, the article calls the ARPANET of 1969 "the predecessor of the Internet" and Kleinrock "one of the central creators of the ARPANET", and the source it cites there, footnote 7, is a paper of which Kleinrock is an author and which uses neither word.

2.5 Mike Godwin, at footnote 39, writes that the administration continued to lobby for key escrow after it abandoned the Clipper Chip, and line 81 cites him for the abandonment of key escrow by 1996.

2.6 At line 23, the article names the statute of 1991 the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991, and the President's remarks on signing it, footnote 10, name it the High-Performance Computing Act of 1991. The essay of Kahn and Cerf at footnote 3 and the CPSR newsletter at footnote 9 call it the High Performance Computing and Communications Act. Wikipedia High Performance Computing Act of 1991: Reference Audit | Network, Not Protocol audits the article on the statute.

2.7 The footnotes misdate three of their sources and mismatch a fourth: footnote 58 gives April 26, 2008 for a column posted April 28, 2006; footnote 59 gives October 27, 2003 for an article dated October 26, 2003; footnote 69 gives May 4, 2005 for an article dated May 4, 2004; and footnote 9 names a book chapter of 1995 and links a newsletter of 1993.

2.8 Footnote 8 of this article cites the same file as footnote 44 of the Wikipedia article Leonard Kleinrock, which Wikipedia Leonard Kleinrock: Reference Audit | Network, Not Protocol graded Uncheckable because the capture it read redirected. The capture of July 22, 2007 named by footnote 8 of this article reads, and it shows that the paper's title is "The Internet rules of engagement: then and now". The grade of footnote 44 on that page has not been changed.

3.0 Most lines of the article carry no footnote, and the sources of other footnotes bear on some of them.

3.1 Of the 176 lines of Exhibit A, 67 lines carry footnotes: lines 15, 16, 21 through 23, 27 through 29, 31, 33, 36, 39, 40, 42 through 45, 49, 54, 57 through 60, 67 through 69, 72, 73, 75, 77 through 81, 91, 93, 96, 98, 99, 101, 102, 106, 109, 111, 112, 123 through 128, 131, 137, 140, 145, 148, 149, 151, 154, 157, 159, 163, 166, 168 through 170 and 172. Every other line carries none, including the lead at lines 9 and 10, the words of Vinton Cerf's joke at line 150, the founding of Current TV at lines 156 and 158, and the honors at lines 171 and 173.

3.2 The release at footnote 70, cited at line 159, also supports the honor of line 173, which carries no footnote. The article of footnote 69 dates the purchase of line 156 to May 4, 2004, and the transcript of footnote 71 says that Current TV was founded in 2005.

3.3 The foreword at footnote 26 welcomes the revised edition of The Internet Companion, which bears on the words first edition at line 61, and Billboard at footnote 40 titles Gore's piece "No More Information Haves and Have-Nots", which bears on the title given at line 83.

4.0 Of the 85 citations, 38 carry the sentence that cites them, 21 carry it in part, 3 do not carry it and 23 cannot be checked.

4.1 The 38 citations graded Supported are footnote 3 at lines 21 and 131, footnote 4 at line 22, footnote 5 at line 23, footnote 10 at line 29, footnote 15 at line 36, footnote 22 at line 58, footnotes 23 and 24 at line 59, footnote 26 at line 67, footnote 28 at line 69, footnote 30 at line 72, footnote 32 at line 75, footnotes 34 and 35 at line 78, footnote 38 at line 80, footnote 40 at line 91, footnote 41 at line 93, footnote 42 at line 96, footnote 43 at line 98, footnote 47 at line 106, footnote 48 at line 109, footnote 50 at line 112, footnote 52 at line 123, footnote 55 at line 126, footnotes 56, 57 and 58 at line 127, footnotes 59 and 60 at line 128, footnote 62 at line 137, footnote 65 at line 148, footnote 68 at line 154, footnote 69 at line 157, footnote 71 at line 163, footnote 73 at line 168, footnote 74 at line 169 and footnote 75 at line 172.

4.2 The 21 citations graded Partial are footnotes 6 and 7 at line 23, footnote 8 at line 27, footnote 9 at line 28, footnotes 13 and 14 at line 33, footnote 17 at line 44, footnote 19 at line 49, footnote 25 at line 60, footnote 27 at line 68, footnote 29 at line 69, footnote 33 at line 77, footnote 39 at line 81, footnote 45 at line 101, footnote 46 at line 102, footnote 49 at line 111, footnote 54 at line 125, footnote 57 at line 131, footnote 63 at line 140, footnote 64 at line 145 and footnote 70 at line 159.

4.3 The 3 citations graded Not supported are footnote 28 at line 68, footnote 37 at line 79 and footnote 51 at line 112.

4.4 The 23 citations graded Uncheckable are footnote 1 at line 15, footnote 2 at line 16, footnotes 11 and 12 at line 31, footnote 16 at lines 39, 40, 42 and 43, footnote 18 at line 45, footnote 20 at line 54, footnote 21 at lines 57 and 78, footnote 31 at line 73, footnote 36 at line 78, footnote 44 at line 99, footnote 53 at line 124, footnote 61 at line 128, footnote 66 at lines 149 and 170, footnote 67 at lines 149, 151 and 170, and footnote 72 at line 166.

5.0 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.

5.1 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.

5.2 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.

6.0 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.

6.1 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.

6.2 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.