Effective with this sentence, Wired News will no longer capitalize the “I” in internet.

At the same time, Web becomes web and Net becomes net.

Why? The simple answer is because there is no earthly reason to capitalize any of these words. Actually, there never was. —Tony Long

It’s Just the ‘internet’ Now  (Wired)

Thank goodness. I occasionally capitalized Internet internet when used as a noun — probably more than I wanted to, thanks to Microsoft Word’s “autocorrect” feature.

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  • I am absolutely outraged that anyone in the world would even think about taking the grandeur out of the Internet by taking out the "I," and replacing it with a lousy "i." I am going to write my senator about this and have many friends in high power of the internet white house thing and we will get this issue resolved immediately. This internet is an expensive thing and I won't allow a couple of lousy 13 year olds go off and try to break my internet.

    Just think about it.

  • You make a good point, Matt. I'd definitely capitalize "World Wide Web," but I'm not sure that when I write "web authorship" or "web link" I'm always talking about the World Wide Web. If it's not a "Web page" unless it's accessible via the World Wide Web, then I'm wrong. If there are other kinds of webs besides the particular one that, then there's some wiggle room.

    Don't get me started about the missing hyphen in "World Wide Web." :)

  • Gotta disagree here. Web is (and should continue) to be capitalized because it's short for World Wide Web, a proper name. Internet, by contrast, should not ever have been capitalized because it is not a proper name and refers to no network in particular. Ditto for net.

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Dennis G. Jerz

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