Internet to be lowercase in New York Times and Associated Press

As early as 1990, I recall the guidance on capitalization being, if you are referring to internet as a class of internetwork, (possibly an internal network) then you use the lower case. If you are referring to Internet as the Internet (that is, the world wide network, globally routable, connecting all sites) you use the capital letter. The difference is between the noun, internet, and one particular internetwork, the Internet.

In the last 25 years or so, the concept of an internet has basically disappeared (for the most part, maybe we just call it a LAN/WAN now), while the Internet (soon, according to NYT and AP, internet) is all that people mean when they refer to internet now. Which I guess is how language evolves.

This makes sense. The "internet" belongs alongside air, water, electricity etc. It's now a ubiquitous part of this world and in my books everyone has the right to access it without censorship or surveillance.

One Internet, one Earth. Proper nouns, all capitalized.

Guess I'm old. I've always capitalized it and generally never seen informed people using lowercase. And that's ignoring the public Internet versus any internet.

Maybe now the iOS spellchecker might do the same thing.

> "It will probably take a while to get shift-I out of our muscle memory."

If only there was technology to flag potential spelling errors in the editor along with all of the other automated style rules used by the industry.

But the Hindernet will still be capitalized.