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High Performance Computing Act of 1991
The Gore-championed legislation that funded the backbone infrastructure that became the commercial internet — the foundational example of what democratic technology policy can achieve when political will is mobilized.
The High Performance Computing Act of 1991 was a bipartisan piece of legislation, championed by then-Senator Al Gore, that authorized approximately $1.7 billion in federal investment over five years for high-performance computing infrastructure, supercomputer research, and the network that would become the commercial internet. The act funded the National Research and Education Network, which carried the internet's first commercial traffic, and the development of Mosaic, the first widely-used graphical web browser. It is the founding operational example of what Gore calls democratic technology policy: a deliberate public investment in infrastructure that would not have emerged from market dynamics alone, designed to create broad access to transformative capability.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The political work required to pass the act was substantial. In 1991, the internet was still primarily an academic and military network, known to perhaps a few hundred thousand users. Gore was explaining concepts — packet switching, network protocols, the commercial potential of