My 2010 AP Stylebook says yes and when writing at work that is the reference we use.
However, it seems:
A) Wrong
B) Possibly out of date
AP has changed its mind from “e-mail” to “email” around 2010 or so. Maybe this?
I know with style manuals it is hard to say one is “right” and the final arbiter of all thing writing style related and that more importantly is to pick a way of doing something and sticking to it.
Still, curious about an answer to this.
Also, while we’re at it, what about the “World Wide Web”?
Both the Internet and the World Wide Web are (virtually) singular things. You can have other internets and other webs, but these two are singular things - the system of interconnected computers that share information based on certain protocols around the world. They should be capitalized.
An internet is any computer network composed of multiple smaller networks joined together. There is one specific internet which happens to be far, far larger than the next-largest, and that one is referred to as the Internet, capitalized as a proper noun. In common usage, this specific large internet is almost always what people mean, and so “Internet” should be capitalized.
Nobody really uses the small-i definition of “internet” anymore, since it’s assumed that any local network will most likely be a TCP/IP one. They’ll use a term like “LAN” instead. I remember learning this distinction in my networking class in 2001 and it was dated even then.
If you have a local network, it’s a LAN. If I have a local network, that’s also a LAN. If we connect the two of them together, they become an internet. We can then, if we choose, connect that internet to a bunch of other LANs and internets and they all become part of the Internet.
The number of people who, even if they were aware of it, would never need to use the word (small-first-letter) internet vastly outnumber the number who will. And to that majority the Internet is little different from the phone network, a generic service, so capital letter Internet will lose even if it’s technically correct.
When I was a kid I was told that titles like Mother, and words like Winter* should be capitalised, and I tend to stick with that. But it always looks weird, because hardly anybody else does it.
I used to get a red wiggly line whenever I failed to capitalise Internet.
Right, so in practice, the word should essentially always be capitalized, since it’s a proper noun. The fact that it’s always a proper noun is hardly a reason to not capitalize it-- One might as well argue that “dave” should not be capitalized.
