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There used to be things that weren’t the “Internet” that required acknowledgement of the difference with a noun, maybe. Like AOL and Prodigy were online but they weren’t the Internet. You could get to the Internet from them, but it was a distinct experience.
I remember this being debated already in the 1990s, when the press wanted to start writing "internet". I think it's still the Internet (proper noun) and nothing has essentially changed since then.
The main explanation, which the article does mention, is that there's a tendency to capitalize novel terms: Big Data, Open Source, the World Wide Web, the Internet, Artificial Intelligence, etc. Some of these, including the Internet, are still often capitalized. But it can start to be a bit silly if you have a sentence like "We used Open Source Artificial Intelligence software to analyze our Big Data on the Cloud."
From there, we got the later backformation "intranet" for a network within an organisation.
When the TCP/IP suite became ubiquitous, some people concluded the distinction between "the" Internet, as defined by the root DNS servers, and "the internet" was superfluous, as there was essentially only one internet. There are no doubt internets running factories that are not "the internet" but for practical purposes the term is not ambiguous, as one would normally mention if such a network was disconnected.
The article is wrong in its definition of lower-case "internet" as an instance of any network running the IP stack.
For what it’s worth, the most recent Australian government style guide changed "the Internet" to "the internet". (But it’s not actually published by the government, and this edition has been controversial for other reasons.) I might personally use the upper case version if I thought there might be some ambiguity in the context, which would be almost never.
I'm an author of 19 academic textbooks (my latest one published in 2020), and our publisher style guide still requires that Internet be capitalized.
This article is based on misunderstanding, misunderstanding that could have been avoided had the author bothered to read the original internet memos which are, not surprisingly, available online! > capitalization [...] underscored that the Internet we used was just one particular iteration of the larger category of internets Actually we have a term for this concept and that term is the lowercase "internet". There wer…
Did you type "Web" in lowercase to make a point? :)
This article is based on misunderstanding, misunderstanding that could have been avoided had the author bothered to read the original internet memos which are, not surprisingly, available online! > capitalization [...] underscored that the Internet we used was just one particular iteration of the larger category of internets Actually we have a term for this concept and that term is the lowercase "internet". There wer…
> it says to me "people who think the network is Facebook and Google accessed through a web browser" Did you type "Web" in lowercase to make a point? :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The main explanation, which the article does mention, is that there's a tendency to capitalize novel terms: Big Data, Open Source, the World Wide Web, the Internet, Artificial Intelligence, etc. Some of these, including the Internet, are still often capitalized. But it can start to be a bit silly if you have a sentence like "We used Open Source Artificial Intelligence software to analyze our Big Data on the Cloud."
However the Internet is like the Earth — there is but one.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about Internet2?
It is of course part of The Internet, and is a testbed for new internet protocols. And obscure enough that you already knew that :-)
Or maybe I'm not sufficiently appreciating the internet aspect of The Internet and confuse it with the IP-only Internet back-bone. ;-}