Associated Press Style: No more capitalizing internet and web

boing
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[Read the post]

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Internet.

Hah. I am a rebel.

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Nope nope nope. There can be only one, and that one is capitalized.

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No you’re not as you have correctly capitalised it for the start of the sentence. :stuck_out_tongue:

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China, United States, Internet, Japan…

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Anxiously awaiting my spell-checker to update itself. Or is that Spell-checker?

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Curses!

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Please note that bOiNG bOiNG will continue improperly capitalizing itself.

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According to my networking books an internet is a network of networks. The Internet, with a capital I, is the global internet that includes Boing Boing and me.

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What’s more disturbing is that the AP is endorsing the use of the imperialist term “internet” in the first place, rather than the term its own denizens prefer for itself, “teh intarwebz.”

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I will will continue to capitalize on the coffee pot, for now.

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I never thought they should be capitalized in the first place. Nothing special about the online world. It’s like talking about the family fridge. Just a tool. Not THE tool.

Then again, I love my fridge. Hmmmmmm…

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Thank God I am not the only one who still knows this.

In before the “language changes, dude, get with the times” hipsters!

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OK. You had your say.

NOW get with the times.

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Get it right, please-- it’s “Teh IntarWebz”.

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Hey! My Coffee Pot is not generic!

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what about the generic term Ipad?

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You’re both wrong! It’s teh Intertubz!

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Yes, arguably in the global sense, there really can be only one. Saying it’s generic suggests that there could be multiple independent instances of it, and there aren’t, really. Sure, ‘the Internet’ is a large and complex beast with a lot of subsystems, but they’re all connected to a single amorphous organization. (Just like in ye olde days when there could be many phones but there was only one Bell System to rule them all.)

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Suppose it was possible to partition the Internet. For example, suppose China could actually sever all connections to the rest of the world. Would we still have the internet? Or a collection of Internets?

Maybe somebody could still still read data in Nepal, run across the border, and retype it on Sina-net. Is it still partitioned? Does Sneakernet count as part of the web (or Web?)