The internet wasn’t invented by any single person nor did it come into some single state all at once. There was a bunch of parallel research lines that feed into one another.

Specifically the Internet we all know and love today was enabled solely by legislation that allowed commercialization of networks that had been developed by the government and only for the government (ie ARPANET which had really come out of a way to try to maintain communications up in the face of a nuclear attack). If there’s one group of humans that created the internet, I’d say it’s the politicians that allowed it to come into being and set the very early path before it had accumulated so much scale that it became a separate uncontrollable entity. All the technical developments were super important and there were many good ideas but technical ideas were largely funded by research grants from governments here and we know that technical solutions will come about regardless of details when there’s a business need. TCP/IP is remarkably simple as a concept and even the initial implementation isn’t thaaat complicated and it kept getting refined many times over - techies were passionate about networking and were never going to let it drop from a technical failure level. There are scaling challenges that hit in various points but those will always be overcome somehow through market competition (fairly inevitable once there’s enough independent researchers). Ethernet is far more complicated but we had Internet before that was even a thing.

> A claim about "the Internet" is a claim about the Internet. A claim to have "took the initiative in creating" a thing is going beyond a claim to have made a significant positive contribution, even an essential one, to that thing.

I think you’re intentionally missing the quote in context. Here’s the relevant quote:

> During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system."

The one sentence you are saying is him lying reads very much like a throwaway that he expands upon immediately to explain what he means by that. It’s a live interview - you have to be intentionally trying to misrepresent what’s actually said, and ignoring the context of all the engineers working on the project supporting with “yup - Al Gore is 100% accurate and no other politician met with us regularly and fought to get us funding and without him I’m not sure the internet would have happened”. Now maybe they’re overstating a bit since Gingrich and other republicans also saw the value here and helped with bipartisan work in the 90s. But if I recall correctly he was pushing for funding for projects critical to the internet in the 80s and then pushing for commercialization in the 90s.

So, to me his quote in context certainly doesn’t read like he’s claiming sole credit for invention of the internet. It reads more like “I was a critical member of the political body that allows the internet to happen”. Is this interpretation agreeable to you? If yes, is it true or false? If no to either question, please elaborate why in-context the quote is a problem and/or how he’s taking undue credit beyond regurgitating one sentence in a broader discussion that includes a clarification on what he’s meaning.

The internet started in the 50s. We can assume Al Gore knows this because of how (largely uniquely for politicians) passionate he was about this (basically a political fan boi who understood the practical applications and the value of one’s he couldn’t even imagine yet). So why would we choose the most uncharitable interpretation of one line that clearly doesn’t seem to be meant that way in context? Especially when that uncharitable interpretation requires us negating the intelligence and forward looking of a man that clearly had that quality (note how politically ahead of his time he was on climate change too). These aren’t hard issues to be on the right side of. They are significantly more rare in the political class though and probably one of the reasons he lost. Can’t have a competent president that understands long term decision making. We might start expecting that be the norm.