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I can understand why the saga above was eventually closed, but it seems to me to be yet another example of US-centric decision-making. Pretty much all of the rest of the world doesn't capitalise, and everyone understands what it means, and why the World Wide Web is different and a proper noun. In my professional life, WAN was always used in preference to "an internet", from at least 10 years ago and probably 15. And having just googled my way through a variety of sources, I still think it's the wrong decision to capitalise. I suggest raising it again in 2021, taking steps to ensure that enough non-US-based editors participate in the discussion. Laterthanyouthink (talk) 04:31, 21 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Laterthanyouthink, perhaps you are saying then that this should not be a monolithic single style, but rather a WP:ENGVAR issue, where in American English we capitalize most times, but in e.g. British English or Indian English we would not. Elizium23 (talk) 04:49, 21 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
To distract from the discussion, why is it that "the Internet" didn't get an actual name, other than that of its underlying technology? As it was being built, and even now, parts of it have names. There was NSFNET and MILNET, the early parts of the US Government run scientific and military networks, respectively. US DOE ran ESNET (Energy Sciences network). I do find it interesting sometimes to find people whose family name is actually an ordinary noun, though many names are based on (presumably historically) someone's occupation. In any case, the Internet could have had a nice name like WorldNet or GlobalNet or some such, but it didn't. In any case, it does need a proper noun name, and that seems to be Internet. Gah4 (talk) 16:54, 17 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I think a significant part of the issue is what "Internet" is being referred to. The Internet architecture or Internet model has always been, and will presumably always be, capitalized. The capitalized Internet, at least in academia, refers to the Internet in relation to those. I.e., not the web, not Instagram, not Reddit, not Wikipedia, not a random website, etc, while the internet tends to refer to a service, such as Facebook, Instagram etc rather than the infrastructure or architecture itself or the coordination or governance thereof. Compare, for example, "I read that vaccines cause autism on the internet" (lowercase intended) vs "a core value of the Internet model is its descriptive nature over a prescriptive dito such as the OSI-model" (capitalization intended). Flindeberg (talk) 23:13, 18 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
The Internet is not "a thing", or has a well defined governance structure, or is even well defined. I cannot see how someone could intentionally name "it". Compare with, for example, Bluetooth. Bluetooth is well defined, it is a basket of protocols for radio communication over short distances. Bluetooth has a well defined governance structure, the Bluetooth Special Interests Group (SIG). If the Bluetooth SIG change the name of Bluetooth to Rednose that name change would be final. In contrast there is no centrally governing institution for the Internet. There is ICANN, which formally coordinates the DNS-root most of the Western world uses (or more precise, IANA does that), but only the root (i.e. TLDs), it has no power over those who chose to use a different root (which is very possible technically). IP-number spaces are more difficult in a technical sense to avoid, but nothing prevents you from using another IP (except that packets won't reach you) or announce your own prefix (which most networks would ignore) etc. There is also the IETF, and the IETF publishes documents in a series called the RFC-series, some of these RFCs are intended to be used as standards, but no one will force you to follow those standards. I think this is quite central to the whole naming / capitalization issue. Since there is no coherence except an voluntary agreement to use some standards roughly according to specification it is hard to define what it is and what to name it. Flindeberg (talk) 23:23, 18 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, I hadn't seen that. Not a formal RFC but a well-attended discussion. Given that that went nowhere, there doesn't seem much point in launching anything new at the moment. Maybe things will become clearer in a year or two. MichaelMaggs (talk) 16:04, 28 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry, I misremembered that as an RFC. My bad.
I think it's only a matter of time before Wikipedia formally goes lowercase. The weight of the reliable sources on this subject is crushing at this point and, as you pointed out on the other talk page, it's obviously out of keeping with our caps policy generally, and as far as I can tell the only opposition is dogmatic. It's probably correct that Wikipedia is the last major publication (if that's the right word) to decap, since Wikipedia follows rather than leads. Popcornfud (talk) 16:29, 28 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, I agree. That discussion was a fascinating read, though. My favourite argument, the absolute definition of linguistic prescription, was "Come now, you must recognise why 'everyone else is doing it' is a poor reason :) Just remember that no matter how popular something is, that doesn't always make it correct or right."MichaelMaggs (talk) 17:03, 28 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
It seems to me that it is a thing, in the sense that you know if you are, or are not, connected to it. Not so many years ago, it was usual for large (or small) corporations to have their own (small i) internet. There wasn't a big need to connect to outside networks. (In the NSFnet days, connections such as e-mail were not allowed between .COM domains. Academic and government users could contact each other, or .COM, though.) There was, and I believe still is, MILnet, the internet for the US defense department. NSFnet was US government funded for connecting (mostly) universities with government contracts. And for some time there was UUnet, a network of hosts connected through the UUCP protocol using dialup modems. I suspect the (big I) Internet could have had a more original name, if it had been thought up at the right time. There are likely still some corporate and government nets not connected to the (proper noun) Internet. Gah4 (talk) 21:15, 28 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Comment If what you said is true, then the rest of the world is wrong, we should definitely capitalize the word. The word internet (also internetwork) is simply a contraction of the phrase interconnected network. However, when written with a capital "I", the Internet refers to the worldwide set of interconnected networks. Hence, the Internet is an internet, but the reverse does not apply.
This is not accurate. The first publication I'm aware of that uses the term internet is RFC 791; it never uses the term as a noun, but only as an adjective, an abbreviation of internetworking. It is a purely technical term. The term the Internet, as a proper noun, developed later; see e.g. RFC 1462. It refers to a particular world-wide network of computers connected by the networking technology described in RFC 791. It is a technical term, but it also refers to this network as a medium. The spelling without the capital, internet, became more common later. Further, for some time during the 1990s, certain publications would use internet as a mass noun, without an article, as in "We have internet." That was always without capital. I don't think this is used anymore. Finally, some people, like you, claim internet can be a countable noun, so we can speak of an internet. I have often seen this claim, but I have never actually seen the word being used in this way, other than in these claims.
These different uses of internet are all related but different terms, and they can be difficult to distinguish. Rp (talk) 13:21, 6 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Comment I find it odd that the strongest argument for "Internet" over "internet" seems to be that "Internet" is allegedly more common in America, at least according to a 2016 Oxford analysis of online sources. This was almost a decade ago, so I'd be curious to see if this has changed. In my own anecdotal experience as an American, I very rarely (as in almost never) see capitalized "Internet." I've seen "Internet" only on Wikipedia and in news articles from a shrinking number of outlets that still capitalize it, but never anywhere else, never in day-to-day life. Of course, personal anecdotal experience doesn't matter, but what does matter is that by this point almost all American news outlets, the US government, all US tech companies, and even the APA style guide are solidly on the lowercase "internet" side. TL;DR: no, Americans do not use "Internet." I'm honestly very surprised that this is even considered a controversial subject. At this point, I think the only reason why we keep capitalizing it is for consistency reasons, i.e. because we already capitalize it everywhere else, so we continue to capitalize it on new articles. We should really get around to changing this. Vanilla Wizard 💙23:18, 3 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Capitalizing "internet" explicitly goes against MOS:CAPS, which says to capitalize terms only when they are "consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources". Once in a while someone creates a new discussion about this and it ends in no consensus as a sizeable contingent of people end up arguing for a technical or grammatical distinction that is no longer reflected in sources. Popcornfud (talk) 13:34, 6 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
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Please change "India's 28%" to "India's 60%" Reference 101 is correct, just uses wrong column for statistic, should be Penetration% Population not Users% Asia. NoLegsMcGee (talk) 23:12, 7 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The former includes "In 1974, Vint Cerf at Stanford University and Bob Kahn at DARPA published a proposal for "A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication". Cerf and his students used the term internet as a shorthand for internetwork in RFC 675, and later RFCs repeated this use.", but does not explicitly refer to "The Internet" as we know now it. History of the Internet#TCP/IP is equally vague. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits11:57, 8 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Your request is ambiguous: from a linguistic point of view, the term internet is used in three different ways, that do not appear to have originated at the same time:
as an adjective, namely, a noun premodifier of the same type as interstate, transgender, and cross-country; all uses in RFC 675 are of this type;
as a proper noun, a name: the Internet or the name of a medium, analogous to the radio: the internet; I believe this way of using the term is several years younger; but it is hard to prove, since such premodfiers are often (interstate) but not always (cross-country) used as nouns;
as an uncountable noun, analogous to TV: e.g. in we have internet at home or I saw it on internet, a usage that was popular some time during the 1990s.
Are you looking for the first use of the term at all (which may be RFC 675) or its first use as a noun (which is not RFC 675)?
level-3 vital article is rated B-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.
Done ~Kvng (talk) 15:03, 10 February 2024 (UTC)
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