No, that is wrong....completely. You are missing the point I think. DARPA Defense Advanced Research Agency
The Al Gore's comments were a joke because this had nothing to do with him,. took place long before him, using concepts he can't even grasps, but he took the credit. That's the joke.
So, long ago, DARPA was tasked with designing military communications to solve some problems of "hardness." Highly secure, un-defeatable. Self routing, muit-routing, modular, extensible, and some other things too deep to discuss here.
I mean they may have actually created SkyNet. We just don't know where this will lead. It's emergent. The Internet is like DNA. Pretty useless. But, when it's allowed to do it's emergence thing, Holy Gravy of all types.
The govt did not invent
WWW....we did. Well I was 4th row spear carrier. 2rd row now! I moved up.
So, it's tech jargon that I speak better than English these days, so I'm trying not to boar you.
Everything we do is on the Internet. It's protocol stack has not changed at bit, DARPA invented that STACK of protocol layers, and other things have been tried. This works better. So we build on it. We are not emerging it. It is emergent on it's own. We, industry, see potentials gathering from advances in the Hardware. We dream up software to use the new hardware....then for years we would just throw tech at customers and see what emerges. Then gather all that usage we didn't intend, and most certainly could not plan for.
From all that "need" analysis we design more hardware. All these investments are mostly private now, but, back in the 60s the Defense Lab came up with TCP/IP. However, the Internet has it's own life and own peragaotives and may well become SkyNet.
Please don't think the www and the internet are two different things. They are not. WWW emerged. I know by know the guys that put it together.
My first Company Sun Microsystem, contributed many things. XML, Java, SPARC processors. But, SUN is an accompany. Stanford Unix Network. (I haven't even spoken about operating systems)
Take TCP/IP, this new thing from Bell Labs, UNIX, and a trick little technique just emerging called Ethernet.
Shake in the Motarola 68000 microprocessor and you have nothing.
Labor over C code to teach the the processor to speak Ethernet. Almost there. Only possible with UNIX, this is 1979. Get two, from Vinods to Andy's office run that big fat old Ethernet cable that was about $1OO a foot between them and see if you can get the equivalence of Alexander Ghram Bell and his first telephone call to the other room.
They did. A few years later I was hired to spread the word we had invented Ethernet networking on microprocessor. Robert Metcalf at Zerox had just invented Ethernet in 1973. And we built a $20 B Company that ran for almost 30 years, by inventing our own processor, SPARC.