Senator Al Gore developed the Act[1] after hearing the 1988 report Toward a National Research Network[8] submitted to Congress by a group chaired by UCLA professor of computer science Leonard Kleinrock, one of the creators of the ARPANET, which is regarded as the earliest precursor network of the Internet.

President George H. W. Bush predicted that the Act would help "unlock the secrets of DNA," open up foreign markets to free trade, and a promise of cooperation between government, academia, and industry.

[11] The Gore Bill helped fund the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, where a team of programmers, including Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, created the Mosaic Web browser[7][12] in 1993, the commercial Internet's technological springboard credited as beginning the Internet boom of the 1990s.

[13] Gore reiterated the role of government financing in American success in a 1996 speech when he, as vice president, said, "That's how it has worked in America.

Government has supplied the initial flicker—and individuals and companies have provided the creativity and innovation that kindled that spark into a blaze of progress and productivity that's the envy of the world.