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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."
Emphasis on actual words, with an obligatory side dish of context.
The key is not taking a quip on a live light entertainment show out of context, and resisting the urge to cough up shallow takes decades later perpetuating a politically biased take.
There's always some nincompoop who brings that up. Al Gore deserves credit for what he did as a senator and vice president. He helped to pass legislation that enabled the NSFNET backbone to grow and to permit commercial traffic to flow on the government-sponsored backbones in the US. Had he not done that, it's pretty likely that the commercial sector would not have seen an opportunity to create a commercial internet that all of us can enjoy, so he does deserve some credit for what he's done.
— Vint Cerf, Tracking the Internet into the 21st Century <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hf0rjtnwC9A>
In a 1999 interview with Wolf Blitzer, he said “During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.” What he meant was that he sponsored the legislation that enabled the Internet to be accessible to the public, and several key Internet figures including Vint Cerf acknowledge his crucial role in enabling the Internet to become a public utility, which was not a given prior to his efforts.
Sure, he was talking himself up in the lead-up to the election and his language could have been more precise, but it was on off-hand remark in an interview, not a prepared speech or published text, and he clearly never claimed he “invented the Internet”.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_techno...
It's been a bit of a thing of mine for much of my life to notice likely bullshit in commonly-held beliefs, and to dig a little to understand what really happened or what was really said or meant.
And yes, I have always done this regardless of the political side, including in cases where there was uproar about things Trump supposedly said, including about the pandemic. (For the record, I'm not a U.S. citizen/voter, and I've voted for both sides of politics in the country where I am a citizen/voter, and my bullshit detector has been applied to both/all sides, including whichever one I was voting for.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_techno...
That is not a claim that he “created the Internet”. He, of anybody, knows that sponsoring legislation to enable the creation of a thing is not synonymous with personally creating the thing.
If he got anything wrong it was to be clumsy with words in a live interview. Who among us has not occasionally been clumsy with words in live conversation? That doesn’t license people to keep insisting we said a thing we didn’t actually say.