When did “the Internet” become “the internet?”

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.

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 were all sorts of internetworking / bridging and translating going on at the time IP was designed; the idea was that the IP protocol could become more ubiquitous (and now de facto utterly ubiquitous) but use of IP does not define the Internet. The idea was that they would all roll up into complete connectivity as desired, and that the way to describe the overall connected world was "the Internet". For after all by definition there can be only one. A global connectome.

And IP isn't even part of it -- you could speak a command into your bluetooth headphone and have it relayed to a remote device -- at that instant your headphone would be an edge device of the Internet.

> Eventually, Arpanet would come to be known as Internet. Once it evolved into the World Wide Web, it was appended with the definite article—the Internet—though the capital “I” served as an implicit reminder that it was just one example of the technology, an Internet among internets.

So this is doubly wrong. First of all, there was the Arpanet (we didn't have many case sensitive machines in those days so I figure you can refer to ARPA's network using whatever case choice floats your boat). And the arpanet protocols were replaced by new ones, IP, with TCP, UDP etc on top) but that didn't make it the Internet -- it was the connectome that did so. The ARPANET was indeed the center of that world at the time, but only in the sense of connectivity and as a medium of experimentation, technical development, and propagation. There were larger "walled garden" networks out there with their own cultures; over time they were connected and everybody influenced each other.

Nowadays when I see "internet" in a non-technical use it says to me "people who think the network is Facebook and Google accessed through a web browser". And that is mostly what this article is about -- had the bogus top nonsense been sliced off it might even have been OK.

One if the best arguments I've heard in favor of this is that it feels like we're on the cusp of interplanetary civilization. Protocols built on IP (particularly TCP/IP) break down hard with half hour packet latencies. Most of the work I've seen to attack this problem goes about it (in part) by conceptualizing each planet as having its own internet, with synchronization between the two internet's being handled by new protocols like DTN.

In the case of "Open Source", that seems to be readily explainable by it being either an adjective or a noun, with the adjective being lower case and the noun being proper. "Internet" fits with that; you might say that an internet service provider provides access to the Internet (or, someday, to one or more internets, once there's really no longer a single Internet).