I remember this being debated already in the 1990s, when the press wanted to start writing "internet". I think it's still the Internet (proper noun) and nothing has essentially changed since then.
The main explanation, which the article does mention, is that there's a tendency to capitalize novel terms: Big Data, Open Source, the World Wide Web, the Internet, Artificial Intelligence, etc. Some of these, including the Internet, are still often capitalized. But it can start to be a bit silly if you have a sentence like "We used Open Source Artificial Intelligence software to analyze our Big Data on the Cloud."
In the case of "Open Source", that seems to be readily explainable by it being either an adjective or a noun, with the adjective being lower case and the noun being proper. "Internet" fits with that; you might say that an internet service provider provides access to the Internet (or, someday, to one or more internets, once there's really no longer a single Internet).
You give me too much credit there. I only heard of the Internet2 (looong time ago and I understood it as a response of academia to the Eternal September). From the Wikipedia article and cursory reading of the information provided at https://internet2.edu/network it isn't entirely clear to me, whether the Internet2 network infrastructure (provided now by Level3 if I got that right) is indeed part of The Internet. Iiuc, it uses the IPv6 protocol, but I don't know whether nodes on Internet2 are reachable directly from nodes on The Internet (which would defeat the purpose, I'd think). And if it is only accessible via gateways, can one still say that it is part of The Internet? In that case, all kind of specialized networks (military, research, private/commercial leased lines, etc.) could be considered to be part of The Internet too, whether they use the IP protocol or not. Not sure, whether that makes sense.
Or maybe I'm not sufficiently appreciating the internet aspect of The Internet and confuse it with the IP-only Internet back-bone. ;-}
This article is based on misunderstanding, misunderstanding that could have been avoided had the author bothered to read the original internet memos which are, not surprisingly, available online!
> capitalization [...] underscored that the Internet we used was just one particular iteration of the larger category of internets
Actually we have a term for this concept and that term is the lowercase "internet". There were all sorts of internetworking / bridging and translating going on at the time IP was designed; the idea was that the IP protocol could become more ubiquitous (and now de facto utterly ubiquitous) but use of IP does not define the Internet. The idea was that they would all roll up into complete connectivity as desired, and that the way to describe the overall connected world was "the Internet". For after all by definition there can be only one. A global connectome.
And IP isn't even part of it -- you could speak a command into your bluetooth headphone and have it relayed to a remote device -- at that instant your headphone would be an edge device of the Internet.
> Eventually, Arpanet would come to be known as Internet. Once it evolved into the World Wide Web, it was appended with the definite article—the Internet—though the capital “I” served as an implicit reminder that it was just one example of the technology, an Internet among internets.
So this is doubly wrong. First of all, there was the Arpanet (we didn't have many case sensitive machines in those days so I figure you can refer to ARPA's network using whatever case choice floats your boat). And the arpanet protocols were replaced by new ones, IP, with TCP, UDP etc on top) but that didn't make it the Internet -- it was the connectome that did so. The ARPANET was indeed the center of that world at the time, but only in the sense of connectivity and as a medium of experimentation, technical development, and propagation. There were larger "walled garden" networks out there with their own cultures; over time they were connected and everybody influenced each other.
Nowadays when I see "internet" in a non-technical use it says to me "people who think the network is Facebook and Google accessed through a web browser". And that is mostly what this article is about -- had the bogus top nonsense been sliced off it might even have been OK.
One if the best arguments I've heard in favor of this is that it feels like we're on the cusp of interplanetary civilization. Protocols built on IP (particularly TCP/IP) break down hard with half hour packet latencies. Most of the work I've seen to attack this problem goes about it (in part) by conceptualizing each planet as having its own internet, with synchronization between the two internet's being handled by new protocols like DTN.
There used to be things that weren’t the “Internet” that required acknowledgement of the difference with a noun, maybe. Like AOL and Prodigy were online but they weren’t the Internet. You could get to the Internet from them, but it was a distinct experience.
Nah, that was years before the WWW (as we used to call it). Those were walled garden networks (CompuServe was another one), which eventually offered connectivity to the Internet too (and not long thereafter either ceased to exist or converted to Internet service provider and/or web services).
AOL was its own independent proprietary network, closer to a very large BBS, with email, chat, and content standards. It bridged to the Internet, as many networks at the time did (and many others did not).
The World Wide Web is a specific set of protocols (mostly: HTML and HTTPS, most would now include CSS and JS a well as other stsndards), which can run across the Internet or other networks, e.g., a disconected LAN.
AOL's joining the Internet had the largest immediate impact on Usenet, another protocol facility which can oerate over the Internet, but also transacted over phone lines (via UUCP) and avian carriers --- 747s carrying tapes between the US and Australia.
John Waterman's The Matrix (1990) is an excellent overview of early networking systems. That edition (there were several revisions) predates even the Web.
Oh, I might be misremembering because I was very small but I could have sworn I used AOL as an ISP and used web browsers (maybe Netscape Navigator?) to browse the web on AOL (maybe version 5 or 6?) in addition to their own weird portal thing which in my very vague memory was a lot like what you are describing.
Is my memory completely false here? It's very possible I'm conflating things from earlier in the 90s with things later in the 90s.
I can't seem to find the book (?) that you're suggesting in a search.
Originally, an "internet" was a network which linked together other smaller networks, for example two university campuses which each had their own, incompatible, in-campus networking technologies. You might have University U1 running IBM and University U2 running Decnet. IP protocols had nothing to do with it.
From there, we got the later backformation "intranet" for a network within an organisation.
When the TCP/IP suite became ubiquitous, some people concluded the distinction between "the" Internet, as defined by the root DNS servers, and "the internet" was superfluous, as there was essentially only one internet. There are no doubt internets running factories that are not "the internet" but for practical purposes the term is not ambiguous, as one would normally mention if such a network was disconnected.
The article is wrong in its definition of lower-case "internet" as an instance of any network running the IP stack.
For what it’s worth, the most recent Australian government style guide changed "the Internet" to "the internet". (But it’s not actually published by the government, and this edition has been controversial for other reasons.) I might personally use the upper case version if I thought there might be some ambiguity in the context, which would be almost never.
Perhaps this is too simple of an explanation to be true, but maybe the lack of capitalization comes from people on the internet typing internet without capitalization, and then the “important publications” all followed suit eventually. Sort of like how no one really uses “LOL” instead of “lol” even though it’s an acronym and of course acronyms are supposed to be capitalized.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 80.9 ms ] threadAnd obscure enough that you already knew that :-)
Or maybe I'm not sufficiently appreciating the internet aspect of The Internet and confuse it with the IP-only Internet back-bone. ;-}
> capitalization [...] underscored that the Internet we used was just one particular iteration of the larger category of internets
Actually we have a term for this concept and that term is the lowercase "internet". There were all sorts of internetworking / bridging and translating going on at the time IP was designed; the idea was that the IP protocol could become more ubiquitous (and now de facto utterly ubiquitous) but use of IP does not define the Internet. The idea was that they would all roll up into complete connectivity as desired, and that the way to describe the overall connected world was "the Internet". For after all by definition there can be only one. A global connectome.
And IP isn't even part of it -- you could speak a command into your bluetooth headphone and have it relayed to a remote device -- at that instant your headphone would be an edge device of the Internet.
> Eventually, Arpanet would come to be known as Internet. Once it evolved into the World Wide Web, it was appended with the definite article—the Internet—though the capital “I” served as an implicit reminder that it was just one example of the technology, an Internet among internets.
So this is doubly wrong. First of all, there was the Arpanet (we didn't have many case sensitive machines in those days so I figure you can refer to ARPA's network using whatever case choice floats your boat). And the arpanet protocols were replaced by new ones, IP, with TCP, UDP etc on top) but that didn't make it the Internet -- it was the connectome that did so. The ARPANET was indeed the center of that world at the time, but only in the sense of connectivity and as a medium of experimentation, technical development, and propagation. There were larger "walled garden" networks out there with their own cultures; over time they were connected and everybody influenced each other.
Nowadays when I see "internet" in a non-technical use it says to me "people who think the network is Facebook and Google accessed through a web browser". And that is mostly what this article is about -- had the bogus top nonsense been sliced off it might even have been OK.
Did you type "Web" in lowercase to make a point? :)
AOL was its own independent proprietary network, closer to a very large BBS, with email, chat, and content standards. It bridged to the Internet, as many networks at the time did (and many others did not).
The World Wide Web is a specific set of protocols (mostly: HTML and HTTPS, most would now include CSS and JS a well as other stsndards), which can run across the Internet or other networks, e.g., a disconected LAN.
AOL's joining the Internet had the largest immediate impact on Usenet, another protocol facility which can oerate over the Internet, but also transacted over phone lines (via UUCP) and avian carriers --- 747s carrying tapes between the US and Australia.
John Waterman's The Matrix (1990) is an excellent overview of early networking systems. That edition (there were several revisions) predates even the Web.
Is my memory completely false here? It's very possible I'm conflating things from earlier in the 90s with things later in the 90s.
I can't seem to find the book (?) that you're suggesting in a search.
(Some place names in English do have "the", but then it is capitalised, for example "The Pines" or "The Hague".)
From there, we got the later backformation "intranet" for a network within an organisation.
When the TCP/IP suite became ubiquitous, some people concluded the distinction between "the" Internet, as defined by the root DNS servers, and "the internet" was superfluous, as there was essentially only one internet. There are no doubt internets running factories that are not "the internet" but for practical purposes the term is not ambiguous, as one would normally mention if such a network was disconnected.
The article is wrong in its definition of lower-case "internet" as an instance of any network running the IP stack.
For what it’s worth, the most recent Australian government style guide changed "the Internet" to "the internet". (But it’s not actually published by the government, and this edition has been controversial for other reasons.) I might personally use the upper case version if I thought there might be some ambiguity in the context, which would be almost never.
Style guides have different rules. Here's BBC saying they don't capitalise all acronyms: https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/collegeofjournalism/entries/8f7c...
And there are words like laser or Benelux that tend not to be capitalised even if the style guide recommends it.