[Ads-l] AP: Internet -> internet and "to lowercase"

[James A. Landau]

On Sat, 2 Apr 2016 17:21:07 Zone-0700 Benjamin Barrett <mail.barretts at GMAIL.COM> wrote:

<begin quote>
The AP has “internet” capitalized at 
https://www.apstylebook.com/?do=ask_editor&pg=faq 
<https://www.apstylebook.com/?do=ask_editor&pg=faq>; however, with their 
2016 Stylebook release, they will stop capitalizing it, as per a tweet 
at http://bit.ly/1N3Qe6o <http://bit.ly/1N3Qe6o>. (Hopefully the rest of 
the world will follow this trend, though they are getting a lot of flack 
from people who seem to think it’s a proper noun.)
<end quote>

Wrong.  There are two different nouns in question here.

"internet" with a lower-case i means any computer network which extends outside the owning organization, as contrasted with "intranet", a network which is used only within the organization.

"Internet" with a capital I means the network on which World Wide Web etc. operate.  It is a proper noun, and therefore capitalized, since there is only one Internet.  Note that it is properly referred to as "the Internet".

Before the name "Internet" was adopted, the network was known as the ARPAnet, after the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which was the original sponsor of the network.  The software used to run the Internet is called TCP/IP, which stands for Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, all five words capitalized.  

- Jim Landau

_____________________________________________________________
Netscape.  Just the Net You Need.

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org