While I have dealt with spelling-related issues before in my spelling reform post from last semester, I’ve never devoted an entire article on how to write one word before. However, given that the (I/i)nternet is something we pretty much all use now, it is necessary to decide just how the word should be spelled. This is definitely something which has tripped me up when writing in the past, and just this week I had to correct an assignment in order to make sure that the word was spelled correctly.
The term was originally just a shortening of “internetwork,” a noun adjunct which could refer to any kind of link from one network to another. Given that this was a general term and not a reference to a specific entity, “internet” would never be capitalized. One of the first definitive uses of “internet” in reference to what would be called the Internet today was a 1974 technical document, Request for Comment (RFC) 675, entitled “Specification Of Internet Transmission Control Program.” However, the term “internetwork” is actually used in the paper. At the time, the network being referred to was ARPANET, one of the first projects to link computers together over long distances, which was established by ARPA, an agency of the U.S. Department of Defense, in 1969.
As more networks were created, many of which engaged in “inter-network” communication with ARPANET, it became clear that in the future there would be a global, decentralized network, which then became referred to as “the ARPA-Internet” and then later “the Internet,” with the capital letter indicating its status as the most important internetwork. The former term was still used in RFC 959 from 1985, but by the introduction of the domain name system in 1987 in RFC 1034“the Internet” was being used.
As the global (i/I)nternet has for the most part removed the need for smaller long-distance connections between computer networks, there was less need for a distinction between an internet and the Internet, as the former sense was not being used nearly as much. You might expect this to have led to the capitalized “Internet” becoming the predominant word form, but the opposite seems to have happened given that the internet is now viewed as a medium rather than as an entity. As mentioned by Susan Herring in her 2015 article for Wired, Apple’s decision to abbreviate internet with a lowercase I in the names of products like the iMac and iPod may have helped away public usage. She also notes that in the Oxford English Corpus, “Internet” was slowly losing ground to “internet,” though in 2015 Internet had not yet been overtaken in the data.
In order to reflect this change in popular usage, many publications which once insisted upon capitalizing “Internet” now consider “internet” to be the default spelling. In 2016, both the Chicago Manual of Style and the Associated Press switched to “internet.” The reasoning given for the latter decision was that it “reflects a growing trend toward lowercasing” the word, which has become “a generic term.”
Capitalization may be one of the more trivial aspects of writing standards, given that the rules for capitalization are typically clear-cut. However, given how commonly the phrase “the internet” is used, especially in journalism, in this case it is an issue which must be resolved but has no clear resolution. This likely explains why so many changes regarding the word’s capitalization have been made, and the coverage these changes get.