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Al Gore says he invented the Internet. What does he mean?

Virginia Postrel from the May 1999 issue

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The Internet thus evolved from the bottom up. It was not designed by a committee of experts as a perfect system whose every use was anticipated in advance. Rather, it was improved over time, through trial and error, collaboration and competition. As a result, the Net became a model of spontaneous order and decentralized governance--of the way simple, underlying rules can permit enormous creativity and complexity. This dynamic, open-ended vision does not fit easily with the technocratic models that dominate the political world.

The history of the Net thus captures a tension in contemporary American life: Government is so pervasive that almost every development, positive or negative, can be tied in some way to government--to subsidies, to tax-code distortions, to regulations. Politicians can claim credit for innovations they did little to create; people who want an even more activist government can point to those same inventions as evidence that government is just dandy; and pork-seeking industries can claim that subsidies and tax credits will make America rich. (Silicon Valley is now demanding that the federal government double spending on research and development.)

The history of the Internet is not, as some people have tried to make it, a libertarian just-so story. It is a messy tale in which the government played a significant role. That role was, however, far more subtle than the plans of industrial policy gurus or techno-boosting politicians.

In fact, we have a pretty good example of what sort of Internet we would have gotten if Al Gore, or someone like him, had created an "information superhighway" on his own initiative. It's called Minitel--the French state phone company's system of terminals. In true French fashion, Minitel was grand, comprehensive, and carefully planned. It was state-of-the-art in the mid-1980s. And it has barely changed since then.