The internet gets decapitalized

Some of the world’s most influential news outlets on Wednesday stopped treating the internet as a proper noun.

The Associated Press, whose style guide is used in many newsrooms, announced back in April that it would soon stop capitalizing the word for the global networks of interconnected computers, which has become ubiquitous in modern life. 

{mosads}The AP timed the change with the release of its 2016 style guide on Wednesday, and a number of other outlets have followed the company’s lead. The New York Times announced last month that it would change over, as did the The Wall Street Journal.

“There are still vocal proponents of uppercase Internet, arguing it is a proper noun,” the Journal wrote. “But the usage is clearly trending lowercase, treating internet as nothing but a generic noun for the global computer network, as deserving of lowercase as television and cable. It will seem strange to many of us to start using it lowercase, but lowercasing proponents note that phonograph was once uppercase, too.”

Following the AP’s lead, The Hill changed over on April 11. 

The early decision to treat the term as a proper noun, according to Wired, was meant to distinguish the worldwide network of connected computers from the generic term for any smaller connection of networks. But the term has come to exclusively define the former.

“I just don’t think most people see it that way anymore. For younger people, it’s always been there; it’s like water,” the AP’s standards editor told the Times last month. 

The AP also said it would begin lowercasing web on all references. It wasn’t until 2010 and 2011 that the AP started treating “website” as one word and took the hyphen out of “email.”

For more than a decade, the U.S. government, most news organization and the largest technology companies all capitalized Internet. When asked back in April, the Federal Communications Commission said its press shop usually follows AP style.