Wired News reckons the time has come to stop capitalizing the word “Internet”. Well that is, of course, entirely their perogative, but in my simple and humble opinion it is a retrograde step that further reduces the precision with which we use the English language, and thereby the richness of meaning that we can convey.
Why?
An internet is simply an interconnected (computer) network—any such network. The Internet is, well, the internet.
To resolve practical matters of the use of English such as this I usually consult Fowler’s Modern English Usage. (‘Modern’, in this context, means sometime after the 18th century.) I have both the second and third editions of Fowler, but the former—edited by Sir Ernest Gowers—is for me the more insightful.
Neither edition directly sheds light on the internet/Internet issue, but Gowers’ essay on capitals is worthy of quotation:
The use of Capitals is largely governed by personal taste, and my own, while not favouring seventeenth-century excess, happens to favour even less the niggardliness now sometimes apparent. The printed page that is starved of capitals suffers not merely in appearance (to my eye at any rate) but also in function, for denial of capitals to well-known bodies, institutions, officials and the like militates against ready reference.
The rest of the entry makes it quite clear (to my mind at any rate) that Wired has done us a disservice. Nevertheless, it can take some consolation in Sir Ernest’s final words on the matter:
Let it be repeated, the employment of capitals is a matter not of rules but of taste; but consistency is at least not a mark of bad taste.
