What did Vice President Al Gore have anything to do with the invention of the world wide web?

Answer 1

Not exactly. He did sponsor a 1988 bill called the National High Performance Computer Act, which helped link universities and libraries with a shared network, and cosponsored a bill in 1992 called the Information Infrastructure and Technology Act, which opened the internet to commercial traffic.

The concept of the World Wide Web was invented in Switzerland by a researcher named Tim Berners-Lee, working at CERN (the European Council for Nuclear Research... the official name is French and they do their adjectives backward, which is why the acronym isn't ECNR). It did rely on the existing "internet" for transmission, but saying that Al Gore invented the world wide web is at least as inaccurate as saying that Alexander Graham Bell did so.

In fairness, though Gore is widely reported as having claimed that he invented the internet, this is not precisely what he said. He did say he took an initiative in creating the internet, which is, though perhaps a bit misleading, more or less true because of the NHPCA and IITA mentioned above... without those acts, it's likely the internet as we know it today would not exist, or would at least have taken significantly longer to develop.