OK, so I've fished out the email that I sent in 2004 to various editors at an American publisher regarding my battle to decapitalise 'internet' for one of my books, a battle that I ultimately lost. It shows how varied opinions are regarding this matter.
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Regarding further discussions about #3, here's an interesting discussion about the matter from NPR's "Talk of the Nation":
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor ... Id=3855589. And here's an
opposing opinion on the BBC site:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3613594.stm.
A friend of mine who subs The [London] Sunday Times responded to the BBC piece saying: "Hmm - I think he's talking rubbish. He's certainly talking rubbish when he says: 'As a journalist I know that if I talk about a Biro then I had better be referring to one of the pens made by the Biro company, and if I mention someone sitting in a Portakabin then it had better be one of Portakabin's products and not just any old temporary office.'
Even if the person is sitting in a Portakabin, he would still get the Portakabin lawyers onto him (and believe me they must have the most overzealous trademark-protection people on the planet) because of course you should never use a trademark as a noun. The correct form, as these lawyers never tire of telling us (and we never tire of ignoring) is "a Portakabin-brand portable building".
Anyway I have to get back to correcting proofs with my Biro-brand ballpoint pen, so I shall send this to you now over the Internet-brand internet (or whatever)."
Doubly so, when you take into account the Beeb's style generally used "internet".
Still, that didn't overly help, so I decided to ask the opinion of a couple of old-hands who've edited a bunch of magazines in this space, to see what they had to say...
#1:
"Welcome to The Great Internet Controversy
When we were working out the last great [magazine] style guide revamp, we spent a long time arguing over this one. Historically, "internet" is just a generic word for a collection of networks connected together. If you have a network around your home, and string a bit of cable between your home network and next doors, you have an internet.
However, THE Internet is something else - it's the world-wide network connecting machines running the TCP/IP protocol. So, in order to distinguish between THE Intenet and AN internet, we decided that we'd capitalise references to THE Internet - it's become a singular entity with a proper name, and as a proper name it gets its own capitalisation."
This point is countered somewhat in #2:
"Hi Craig. Ah, happy memories of agonising over style guides! (or styleguides?) I think it's only possible to resolve these issues sensibly if you adopt certain fundamental principles, not based on objective 'correctness' but on personal preference.
Some people like to make compound words wherever possible (Germans, for example), particularly when a pair of words only makes sense together, as in "stylesheets". They're not sheets that happen to be concerned with style, as opposed to some other kind of sheets; nor are they _sheets_ concerned with style, as distinct from some other thing concerned with style. They're just stylesheets. On the other hand, many people, like you, find compound words ugly and unwieldy. I resisted "website" for years because it always makes me think of the Irish expression "gobshite", but I've gradually got used to it.
Similarly, some people like to capitalise nouns wherever possible (Germans again, and Victorians) because they think it aids legibility by flagging significant words. Others prefer to avoid capitalisation because it breaks the flow of text and is typographically ugly.
***A bad justification for capitalising "Internet" is that the term "internet" can be used to refer to any large and/or open network, whereas by "Internet" we mean a specific global network constituted by certain protocols and so on. That would make sense if anyone actually did use the term "internet" to refer to any old network, but they don't.***
Because of the amorphous nature of the (I/i)nternet, you could also think Platonically: you're not talking about one of a whole bunch of internets, each approximating "internetness" or the Form "Internet"; you're referring
to the Form itself.
A more straightforward justification for capitalising "Internet" is that the Internet is a unique phenomenon and therefore merits its own proper noun. If you were the sort of person who talks about "cyberspace" as a place, you could liken this to capitalising a city or country. That would also get round the objection above: there's no risk of confusing Basingstoke with any old basingstoke, but we still capitalise it.
Even though I'm generally against extra caps, I have a lot of sympathy with this argument. But if you capitalise Internet, why would you not capitalise the world wide web? And "World Wide Web" looks pretty ugly. Then again, if you shorten it to "web", it seems to need a capital to distinguish it from other literal or metaphorical webs. Aaargh!
In the absence of any completely convincing and workable solution, I'm inclined to leave both the internet and the web lower-case, because that's my general preference. So there's my answer. Just don't ask me again tomorrow..."
This is what I'm leaning towards, largely on the basis of gut instinct.
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My sense is that Wired's change will be slow to take hold, especially among book publishers...
And I think that's the crux of it, and also why I'm asking for advice. [names redacted]? Anything to add? In magazines and newspapers (at least those that are any good) - at least in the UK - almost everyone uses lowercase for these forms now. Likewise for the BBC (at least in general). However, I don't know whether this is the case in the USA, Wired excepted.