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From owner-crackmonkey@zork.net Sat Mar 13 20:46:48 1999
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Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 20:39:39 -0800
From: Seth David Schoen <schoen@uclink4.Berkeley.EDU>
To: crackmonkey@zork.net
Subject: [crackmonkey] Al Gore's "Internet History - A Retrospective"
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White House Al Gore
Request for Comments: 3000 Office of the Vice President
Category: Informational April 1999
Internet History - A Retrospective
Status of this Memo
This memo provides information for the Internet community. This memo
does not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Distribution of this
memo is unlimited.
Introduction
It is a pleasure to witness the remarkable success and expansion of the
Internet, which has led to economic growth, prosperity, and jobs for so
many Americans. The Internet has further helped bring the entire human
family closer together, by expanding communications worldwide. This
Information Superhighway has helped businesses, schools, and communities
find and share they information they critically need. It is especially
exciting to me, as one of the principal creators of the Internet, to see
the expanded role of the Information Superhighway in society today.
In March 1999, I happened to mention in a widely-cited interview that
[d]uring my service in the United States Congress, I took the
initiative in creating the Internet.[1]
Many of my constituents, familiar with my work in social and environmental
policy, were previously unaware of the nature of my technical contributions
to the early Internet. A number of them contacted me to ask for the details
of my involvement. I have therefore decided to produce the present
memo as an outline of some of this history. It is my pleasure to present
it in the hope that it will be of some use to amateur Internet historians
and other interested citizens.
This paper provides historical recollections of the development of the
Information Superhighway and (on a personal note) how I took the
initiative in creating it.
Early History of the Internet
The Internet first came into being during my term in the House, as a
direct response to a bill co-sponsored by myself and a number of my
colleagues with an interest in expanding the opportunities available
to Americans with the creation of an Information Superhighway.
With the assistance of a number of fine researchers in both the public
and private sectors, I immediately set to work creating an architecture
for the new network. I came to realize that the new Information
Superhighway would require a large number of standard protocols to allow
computers to communicate with one another easily. Therefore, with the
advice of my colleagues in the House, I began by publishing the first
draft of the Internet Protocol[2], the basic building block of the
Internet.
If you think of the Internet as a highway, my Internet Protocol is
something like a chip of concrete or asphalt which is used to pave that
highway.
Since IP was useful only for getting low-level information from one place
to another, which was not sufficient for all of the applications to which
I anticipated my fellow Americans would desire to put this new technology,
I also produced several companion protocols.
Gore [Page 1]
RFC 3000 Internet History - A Retrospective April 1999
I initially developed the Transmission Control Protocol[3], User Datagram
Protocol[4], and Internet Control Message Protocol[5] in order to bring
flexible session-level communications to American society. These
protocols serve as higher-level guidelines, like road markings or street
signs on a highway, to provide a reliable and robust communications
architecture for future generations.
Further Development of the Internet
Late in my term as Representative from Tennessee, I developed a number of
high-level applications on top of the TCP. Recognizing the invaluable
role e-mail could play in supporting education and commerce, I invented
it and documented a protocol (the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol[6]) and
an Internet standard format[7] for its transmission.
Amidst a program of progressive social legislation, I ran a successful
election campaign for the United States Senate, and was sworn in to
this office in 1985. As a Senator, I continued my efforts to develop
and improve the Information Superhighway, creating increasingly
sophisticated programs and protocols for dealing with the challenges
facing a networked society.
It rapidly became necessary, as a part of the growing Internet, to allow
for the transfer of data files from place to place. Almost immediately
after the beginning of my first Senate term, my office began to receive
a number of calls from concerned citizens from Tennessee and elsewhere,
who argued that the future of America's youth might be severely
handicapped unless the government acted quickly to guarantee a means of
remote file copying. My colleagues and I responded to such concerns
with the File Transfer Protocol[8].
During my Senate term, I was also instrumental in the development of the
new Domain Name System ([9], [10], [11]). I also worked to ensure that
the e-mail systems I had invented only a few years before would receive
the necessary guidance to stay modern and competitive. My leadership
resulted in a specification[12] which detailed the interaction between
e-mail and the DNS, thus guaranteeing that U.S. industry would remain
at the forefront of networking technology for years to come.
I further improved e-mail facilities by creating the Multipurpose
Internet Mail Extensions[13], which further expanded the power of
electronic mail to carry more types of information of importance to
my constituents.
Challenging Times for the Information Superhighway
Late in my second term in the United States Senate, the Internet faced
a number of significant challenges associated with its continued growth.
I worked to build partnerships between the public and private sectors
to help resolve these problems and keep the Information Superhighway
available and useful for all Americans.
As IP address space began to appear scarce, I led an IETF Working
Group charged with finding solutions to the problems associated with
address scarcity. I have always been a dedicated conservationist,
convinced that it is essential for Americans to protect their limited
natural resources; I drew on my experiences within the environmental
movement to illustrate the need to conserve IP address space. Though
a few short-sighted elements within the business community initially
resisted these conservations efforts, I was ultimately able to build
a broad bi-partisan consensus and demonstrate to all concerned that
Gore [Page 2]
RFC 3000 Internet History - A Retrospective April 1999
protecting our IP address space for the benefit of future generations
is in the interest of all Americans.
I produced several concrete proposals to improve address space
conservation, not least of which was Classless Inter-Domain Routing[14],
which allowed ordinary Americans to make more efficient use of their IP
address allocations. It also allowed thousands of previously wasted IP
addresses to be reclaimed and recycled.
Toward the end of my second Senate term, I turned my legislative and
technical efforts toward the developing market of dial-up Internet
access, which was beginning to become a significant factor in the task
of bringing access to the Information Superhighway to the public on a
large scale. My initial efforts yielded the Serial Line Internet
Protocol[15], to which I later added the Point-to-Point Protocol[16].
With the help of my friend and colleague Van Jacobsen, I created a
collection of techniques for IP header compression[17] to alleviate the
burden that full-scale uncompressed IP over a dialup link posed for the
average American.
Beginning during my second term as Senator, and continuing into my
first term as Vice President, I also spearheaded the World Wide Web
project, a new milestone in communications, which helped make the
Information Superhighway more accessible to everyone. Thanks to the
combination of the Hypertext Transport Protocol[18] and Hypertext Markup
Language[19], the World Wide Web was able to transform the way people
across the nation made use of the Internet.
Finally, I worked to address the concern that, with the growth of the
Web and of large-scale commercial dial-up use, Internet routing was
becoming unworkably complex, and needed to be handled in a more elegant,
sophisticated, logical, and efficient manner. Through a partnership
between public and private sectors, I helped produce a pioneering early
version of the Border Gateway Protocol, which set the stage for the
current Border Gateway Protocol, Version 4[20], which I was eventually
honored to co-author as Vice President.
The Clipper and Capstone Initiatives
Over time, many of the users of the Internet began to express concerns
about their privacy and the confidentiality of their communications. In
response to their concerns, the President and I developed a powerful and
flexible architecture designed to, as the President put it,
bring the Federal Government together with industry in a voluntary
program to improve the security and privacy of ... communications
while meeting the legitimate needs of law enforcement.[21]
The President and I noted that we had carefully considered a number of
important factors.
-- the privacy of our citizens, including the need to
employ voice or data encryption for business purposes;
-- the ability of authorized officials to access telephone
calls and data, under proper court or other legal
order, when necessary to protect our citizens;
-- the effective and timely use of the most modern
technology to build the National Information
Gore [Page 3]
RFC 3000 Internet History - A Retrospective April 1999
Infrastructure needed to promote economic growth and
the competitiveness of American industry in the global
marketplace; and
-- the need of U.S. companies to manufacture and export
high technology products.[21]
We carefully considered the concerns raised by law enforcement and privacy
advocacy groups, and discovered that the apparent conflicts between their
opinions were illusory; in fact,
both concerns can be, and in fact are, harmoniously balanced through a
reasoned, balanced approach such as is proposed with the "Clipper
Chip" and similar encryption techniques.[21]
Our Administration additionally developed a sophisticated counterpart of
Clipper for data communications, called Capstone. Capstone is capable of
directly protecting the Information Superhighway and Americans' private
communications. Despite occasional industry opposition, the Administration
has remained committed to its fundamental principles of citizens' privacy
and lawful law enforcement access, and believes, as an independent review
found[22], that the encryption algorithms employed in Clipper and Capstone
are secure and state-of-the-art.
We are very proud of all that we have accomplished with Clipper and
Capstone, which demonstrate the commitment of our Administration to
improving Americans' privacy on the Information Superhighway.
The Development of the World Wide Web and Parental Advisories
As noted above, the development of the World Wide Web (WWW) brought
untold opportunities for the use of the Information Superhighway in
all areas of American society. Unfortunately, it also brought with it
risks and challenges. Since my design for the WWW included simple
facilities for the transmission of pictures and diagrams, the WWW could
also be used to transmit undesirable and inappropriate materials.
My wife Mary Elizabeth (Tipper) has had a lifelong concern for the health,
safety, and well-being of our children, and has long been a tireless
advocate for parental notification and control of explicit Internet
datagrams, which represent one of the greatest threats to the well-being of
our children. During my term as Vice President, Tipper and I learned that
the widespread availability of explicit datagrams on the Internet was a
subject of serious concern to parents and teachers all across our nation.
Tipper devoted herself for several years to the remarkably challenging task
of crafting solutions to these problems which would protect our children
and at the same time respect Americans' rights to freedom of speech. I was
extremely proud of Tipper's work and what resulted from it. She was
instrumental in the development of the Platform for Internet Content
Selection[23], a neutral, flexible, W3C-endorsed architecture for allowing
parents to make responsible choices about the kinds of material their
children could access over the Internet.
Tipper further showed the strength of her character by defending her
efforts in the face of numerous criticisms. When critics claimed that
PICS facilitated automated censorship and would be used by oppressive
regimes to infringe on the human rights of their subjects, my wife
staunchly defended her efforts. I stood behind her and gave her my
strongest possible support, and, in time, the charges that PICS
facilitated censorship and violations of the Universal Declaration of
Gore [Page 4]
RFC 3000 Internet History - A Retrospective April 1999
Human Rights were soundly rebuffed by the W3C:
Some people argue that unrestricted access to information is a
fundamental human rights question that transcends national
sovereignty. W3C has not adopted that position. [...] W3C leaves this
question to the political and legal processes of each country.[24]
It is a remarkable credit to Tipper that she was willing to defend the
principle that access to information is not a human rights question, but
is more properly a narrow technical and parental control issue, at a
time when this point of view was the subject of considerable controversy.
I am extremely proud of her efforts on both advocacy and technical fronts,
which have managed to secure a considerable voluntary consensus in the
media industry in favor of parental advisory labels.
At about the same time that Tipper was developing PICS, I consulted
with those Senators and Representatives who seemed especially dedicated
to the cause of protecting our children, and encouraged them to take
further action toward these ends. The result was the bipartisan
Communications Decency Act of 1996, which enjoyed wide support throughout
the nation. Regrettably, the CDA was overturned by the Supreme Court in
1997[25]. This Court decision, however, has made Tipper's work all the more
essential in assuring that parents retain control over the information
their children obtain.
Internet in the Balance
In 1992, during my first Vice Presidential election campaign, I published
my book _Internet in the Balance: Internetworking and the Human
Spirit_[26]. I believe that this book provides an excellent overview of
the history of the Internet and the roles played by myself and by my
colleagues in its formation.
_Internet in the Balance_ expressed my concerns as a lifelong Internet
activist about the future of the Internet. I described the latest
scientific findings concerning the health and sustainability of the
Internet, as well as some of the threats industrial society, if left
unchecked, could pose to the long-term sustainability of the Internet, and
so to our childrens' future. _Internet in the Balance_ addresses the need
for partnerships between the public and private sectors in maintaining the
health and well-being of the Internet for ourselves and our children as
we move into the twenty-first century.
As Vice President, I have important duties as an elected representative of
the people of the United States. As a technologist, I have obligations to
the survival of the delicate technical systems that make up the Internet.
I believe that these two interests are fundamentally harmonious, and I
have endeavoured in my time as Vice President to balance these two
interests, and especially to demonstrate the important connection between
the well-being of the Internet and the well-being of the United States.
As an expression of my continuing dedication to the important challenge
of shaping the future of Internetworking, I took time during my term as
Vice President to produce the definitive standard for a new "Next
Generation" Internet Protocol, which will serve the needs of the next
generation of Americans as they continue to rely on the Information
Superhighway in all areas of their lives. My "Next Generation" Internet
Protocol, defined in RFC 2460[27], includes 128-bit addressing, as well as
other architectural improvements, and paves the way for an upgrade to a
new, multi-lane Information Superhighway.
Gore [Page 5]
RFC 3000 Internet History - A Retrospective April 1999
Conclusion
As we look toward the dawn of the twenty-first century, Americans have
much to be proud of in the Internet. We can continue to hope that
the Information Superhighway will deliver valuable educational information
to future generations of schoolchildren, stimulate commerce, and keep
ordinary Americans in contact with their government.
I am honored to have been a part of the development of the Information
Superhighway.
Acknowledgments
The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of his wife, Tipper
Gore, as well as that of William Jefferson Clinton, President of the
United States, in the preparation of this document and the completion of
the work described herein.
Portions of this work were funded by the DoD's Advanced Research Projects
Agency and by the National Science Foundation, although I cannot recall
which portions at this time.
References
[1] Gore, A., televised interview with Wolf Blitzer, Late Edition Primetime,
Cable News Network, March 9, 1999.
[2] Gore, A., "Internet Protocol", RFC 791, House of Representatives,
September 1981.
[3] Gore, A., "Transmission Control Protocol", RFC 793, House of
Representatives, September 1981.
[4] Gore, A., "User Datagram Protocol", RFC 768, House of Representatives,
September 1980.
[5] Gore, A., "Internet Control Message Protocol", RFC 792, House of
Representatives, April 1990.
[6] Gore, A., "Simple Mail Transfer Protocol", RFC 821, House of
Representatives, August 1982.
[7] Gore, A., "Standard for the Format of ARPA Internet Text Messages",
RFC 822, House of Representatives, August 1982.
[8] Gore, A., "File Transfer Protocol", RFC 959, United States Senate,
October 1985.
[9] Gore, A., "Domain Administrators Operations Guide", RFC 1033, United
States Senate, November 1987.
[10] Gore, A., "Domain Names: Concepts and Facilities", RFC 1034, United
States Senate, November 1987.
[11] Gore, A., "Domain Names: Implementation and Specification", RFC 1035,
United States Senate, November 1987.
[12] Gore, A., "Mail Routing and the Domain System", RFC 974, United States
Senate, January 1986.
[13] Gore, A., "Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions: Part One, Mechanisms
for Specifying and Describing the Format of Internet Message Bodies",
RFC 1521, United States Senate, September 1993. RFC 1521 has been
complemented and augmented by a number of subsequent works by many
of my friends and colleagues.
[14] Gore, A., "An Architecture for IP Address Allocation with CIDR", RFC
1518, United States Senate, September 1993.
[15] Gore, A., "A Nonstandard for Transmission of IP Datagrams over Serial
Lines: SLIP", United States Senate, June 1988. I chose to call this
protocol a "nonstandard" because of the realization that it was, at
best, a stop-gap measure, and that the American people ultimately
deserved a more complete, functional, and general serial-line
encapsulation protocol. This I ultimately produced in PPP[16].
Gore [Page 6]
RFC 3000 Internet History - A Retrospective April 1999
[16] Gore, A., "The Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP)", RFC 1661, United States
Senate, July 1994.
[17] Gore, A., and Jacobsen, V., "Compressing TCP/IP Headers for Low-Speed
Serial Links", RFC 1144, United States Senate and Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory, February 1990.
[18] Gore, A., Berners-Lee, T., Fielding, R., and Frystyk, H., "Hypertext
Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.0", RFC 1945, Office of the Vice
President, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and University of
California at Irvine, May 1996. The Office of the Vice President
has been working closely with the W3C to produce the current W3C
HTTP/1.1 recommendation.
[19] Gore, A., Berners-Lee, T., and Connolly, D., "Hypertext Markup
Language - 2.0", RFC 1866, Office of the Vice President and
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, November 1995. The Office of
the Vice President has been working closely with the W3C to produce
the current W3C HTML 4.0 recommendation.
[20] Gore, A., Rechter, Y., and Li, T., "A Border Gateway Protocol 4
(BGP-4)", RFC 1771, Office of the Vice President, IBM Corp., and
Cisco Systems, March 1995.
[21] The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, Statement, April 16,
1993.
[22] Brickell, E. F., Denning, D. E., Kent, S. T., Maher, D. P., and
Tuchman, W., "SKIPJACK Review: Interim Report", July 28, 1993.
[23] Gore, M. E., "Platform for Internet Content Selection, Version 1.1":
"Rating Services and Rating Systems (and their Machine Readable
Descriptions)", "PICS Label Distribution Label Syntax and Communication
Protocols", "PICSRules 1.1", and "PICS Signed Labels (DSig) 1.0
Specification", W3C Recommendations, October 1996.
[24] Resnick, P., "PICS, Censorship, and Intellectual Freedom Frequently
Asked Questions", January 26, 1998.
[25] United States Supreme Court, _Reno, Attorney General of the United
States, et al., v. American Civil Liberties Union, et al._ 521 U.S.
___ (1997), case no. 96-511. Appeal from the United States District
Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.
[26] Gore, A., _Internet in the Balance: Internetworking and the Human
Spirit_, Houghton Mifflin 1992.
[27] Gore, A., "Internet Protocol, Version 6: Specification", RFC 2460,
Office of the Vice President, December 1998.
Security Considerations
Security considerations are not addressed in this memo.
Author's Address
Albert Gore
The White House
Office of the Vice President
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, DC 20500
Phone: (202)456-1414
E-mail: vice.president@WHITEHOUSE.GOV
Gore [Page 7]
--
Seth David Schoen / schoen@uclink4.berkeley.edu
He said, "This is what the king who will reign over you will do." And they
said, "Nay, but we will have a king over us, that we also may be like all the
nations." (1 Sam 8) http://ishmael.geecs.org/~sigma/ http://www.loyalty.org/
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