Abbott gaffe gives swift lesson in internet history
A recent comment from Tony Abbott was never going to fly past Australia’s army of internet-enthusiasts. Mr Abbott has credited Liberal frontbencher Malcolm Turnbull with inventing the internet, which it turns out, he did not.
Mr Abbot gave the alarmingly high praise of Turnbull while acknowledging his party for their efforts in NBN reform, the Liberal plan would see a large figure lopped off the total bill for the National Broadband rollout, but would produce a network that is inferior in many ways to the current plan.
Mr Turnbull may have had an illustrious career in the dot-com domain, serving as chairman of OZEmail from 1994 to 1999, at a time when the company was ranked Australia’s 33rd largest internet service provider. Malcolm Turnbull's new title as the man who "virtually invented the internet" has been widely discredited and lampooned on the internet.
Mr Abbott’s comments were likely most informative for Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist who has been labouring under the misapprehension that he invented the internet in the 1980s.