Capitalization of "Internet"

Publishers have different conventions regarding the capitalization of Internet vs. internet, when referring to the Internet, as distinct from generic internets, or internetworks.

Since the widespread deployment of the Internet Protocol Suite in the early 1970s, the internet-standards-setting bodies and technical-infrastructure organizations, such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the Internet Society, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the W3C, and others have consistently spelled the name of the worldwide network, the Internet, with an initial capital letter and treated it as a proper noun in the English language; the Oxford English Dictionary notes that the global network is usually "the Internet", and most of the historical sources it cites use the capitalised form (in one case "the DARPA internet"). Before the transformation of the ARPANET into the modern Internet, the term internet in its lower case spelling was a common short form of the term internetwork, and this spelling and use may still be found in discussions of networking.

The spelling "internet" has become commonly used, as the word virtually always refers to the global network; the generic sense of the word has become rare.

In some of the first printed mentions of the Internet, like many other US government projects of the period it was referred to in all-caps as INTERNET, despite not being an acronym.

The Internet versus generic internets

The Internet standards community historically differentiated between the Internet and an internet (or internetwork), treating the former as a proper noun with a capital letter, and the latter as a common noun with lower-case first letter. An internet is any internetwork or set of inter-connected Internet Protocol networks. The distinction is evident in Request for Comments documents from the early 1980s, when the transition from the ARPANET to the Internet was in progress, although it was not applied with complete uniformity.

Another example from that period is IBM's TCP/IP Tutorial and Technical Overview (ISBN 0-7384-2165-0) from 1989, which stated that:

The words internetwork and internet is [sic] simply a contraction of the phrase interconnected network. However, when written with a capital "I," the Internet refers to the worldwide set of interconnected networks. Hence, the Internet is an internet, but the reverse does not apply. The Internet is sometimes called the connected Internet.

The Internet/internet distinction fell out of common use after the Internet Protocol Suite was widely deployed in commercial networks in the 1990s.

In the RFC documents that defined the evolving Internet Protocol (IP) standards, the term was introduced as a noun adjunct, apparently a shortening of "internetworking" and is mostly used in this way.

As the impetus behind IP grew, it became more common to regard the results of internetworking as entities of their own, and internet became a noun, used both in a generic sense (any collection of computer networks connected through internetworking) and in a specific sense (the collection of computer networks that internetworked with ARPANET, and later NSFNET, using the IP standards, and that grew into the connectivity service we know today).

In its generic sense, internet is a common noun, a synonym for internetwork; therefore, it has a plural form (first appearing in the RFC series RFC 870, RFC 871 and RFC 872) and is not capitalized. In its specific sense, it is a proper noun, and therefore, without a plural form and may be capitalized.

In a 1991 court case, Judge Jon O. Newman referred to it as a mass noun: "Morris released the worm into INTERNET, which is a group of national networks that connect university, governmental, and military computers around the country. The network permits communication and transfer of information between computers on the network."

Argument for common noun usage

In 2002 a New York Times column said that Internet has been changing from a proper noun to a generic term. Words for new technologies, such as phonograph in the 19th century, are sometimes capitalized at first, later becoming uncapitalized. In 1999 another column said that Internet might, like some other commonly used proper nouns, lose its capital letter.

Capitalization of the word as an adjective also varies. Some guides specify that the word should be capitalized as a noun but not capitalized as an adjective, e.g., "internet resources".

Usage examples

Examples of media publications and news outlets that capitalize the term include The New York Times, the Associated Press, Time, the U.S. GPO, and The Times of India. In addition, many peer-reviewed journals and professional publications such as Communications of the ACM capitalize "Internet", and this style guideline is also specified by the American Psychological Association in its electronic media spelling guide. AMA style capitalizes "Internet", and so does the Chicago Manual of Style. The Modern Language Association's MLA Handbook does not specifically mention capitalization of Internet, but its consistent practice is to capitalize it.

A significant number of publications do not capitalize internet. Among them are The Economist, the Financial Times, The Times, the Guardian, the Observer, the BBC, and the Sydney Morning Herald. As of 2011, most publications using "internet" appear to be located outside North America, but the gap is closing. Wired News, an American news source, adopted the lower-case spelling in 2004. Around April 2010, CNN shifted its house style to adopt the lowercase spelling.

As Internet connectivity has expanded, it has started to be seen as a service similar to television, radio, and telephone, and the word has come to be used in this way (e.g. "I have the internet at home" and "I found it on the internet").

External links

• Internet, Web, and Other Post-Watergate Concerns, The Chicago Manual of Style