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Internet, internet, internetworking, ...

Despite the clever lead...

In the general sense, an internet (with a lowercase "i") is a computer network that connects several other networks. The art of connecting networks in this way is called internetworking. See also the related terms intranet and extranet. As a proper noun, the Internet is the publicly available world-wide, interconnected system of computers (plus the information and services they provide and their users) that uses the TCP/IP suite of protocols. Thus, the largest internet in the world is called simply "the" Internet.

...It appears to me, in agreement with a recent (not occuring-to-me-righ-now-as-to-where) article I read that "Internet" be a lower-case "i."

While it is true that "Internet" is what most people are using now, the capital "i" is irrelevant and just a bit hackneyed and obtuse, since the Internet is not part of an acronym, it is not a product, a band, nor does it descend from any of the above. It seems that some of the confusion comes the "the" commonly placed in front, as if it were a proper place, like Montana, "The Internet."

For uses in an encyclopedia that should be in-tune with the vernacular, perhaps the cap "I" makes sense, but in the whole-picture it doesn't make any at all.

The question being: does using "Internet" make any sense as opposed to "internet," on Wikipedia?

I think we should leave it as is. If Merriam-Webster leaves it as Internet, lets leave it as Internet.
Well, perhaps general use is changing now, but the definitions above (which I think I was responsible for) are the way the people who created the Internet always did it - i.e. we used "internet" for the general concept, and "the Internet" as the name of the large system. This usage dates back to the late 1970's, so it has a lot of history. Noel 15:30, 8 Nov 2003 (UTC)
Wired News has now decapitalized 'web', 'net' and 'internet'. ··gracefool |☺ 04:46, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)

It's absolutely nuts to capitalize internet under any circumstances. While it is true that there is only one internet on this planet, I can create a tool for removing glass from a carpet and call it a shargone, as long as I call it a shargone or the shargone it is simply a shargone. If I refer to it as Shargone and try to sell it, then suddenly it is Shargone, not a Shargone.

No, there are many internets on this planet. The Internet is the largest of them. Metamatic 14:40, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)

People get confused mostly, I think, because of God. In Christian theology, somehow we talk about gods and my god and your god and everybody's god, but this is different than referring to God. When we refer to God, we refer to an entity with the name of God. When we lower-case it, it is not a name of something, but a type of something. The internet as we know it is simply the main internet to which we are all referring. If we start saying Internet instead of the Internet, I would have no issues capitalizing it, but it would change the word then.

Ironically, if we say there is only one god, it should not be capitalized because that would imply there could be more. If we say there is only one internet, there could be more. On the other hand, if we say there is only God, it is capitalized and if we say there is only Internet, it is capitalized.

That's how the rules go. That doesn't mean the rules are followed and dictionaries and encyclopedias are descriptive of how the language is used, not prescriptive telling us how to use it. Most people by now capitalize internet. I won't.

Being Wikipedia and all, of course you are entitled to your opinion. However, note that one of the purposes of an encyclopedia is to make terms understandable to the majority (and hopefully all) of the readers. You are free to use the form as you like. But since most of the English-speaking world uses the terminology counter to your declaration of usage, you'll just find that another Wikipedian will edit it behind you. You'll need something more persuasive than "it's nuts" and a declaration of your rules (which you acknowledge others don't follow) to change people's opinions. Your statement on God and god is flawed. It doesn't take into account the fact that people recognize that multiple belief systems exist. Words exist within contexts. "God" and "god" don't mean the same thing, because they cover different contexts. Same thing with Internet and internet. --Amillar 18:55, 1 Jul 2004 (UTC)
  • Might be a stupid question, but DOES IT ACTUALLY MATTER AT ALL? We all know what someone means whether they say 'the Internet', 'the internet', or whatever, just like you know that when someone says 'the USA' or 'the US' or 'America' you know what they're talking about. GET REAL FOLKS. --Cynical 16:36, 12 Sep 2004 (UTC)

In English, it is accepted practice to capitalise proper nouns. The need to prefix the Internet with "the" is no more a problem than it is in writing the Pacific Ocean, or the Hague.

World Wide Web

Who did this with no comments?

  • Revision 41: View Diff . . December 8, 2001 9:00 am by 12.235.7.xxx [Removing pointless comment, fixing /Talk]

I added "Not to be confused with World Wide Web"

duh!?

Does anyone know the difference here?

I do.

Web...capitalize it please. When referring to a website, leave off the capital letter...but, when referring to it as an entity in and of itself, the capital W is a necessity.

Diagram, please, anyone?

Given that one of the areas of confusion that this article ought to be tackling, in my opinion, is the difference between the Web and the 'Net, it really troubles me that we have it illustrated by a diagram representing a part of the WWW. Does anyone have a suitable diagram showing some of the transatlantic and trans-continental trunk lines that actually carry Internet data traffic around some part of the Globe? Is there anyone here with the knowledge to draw a simplified view? --Nigelj 17:03, 28 Nov 2004 (UTC)

A simplified view? Just take any GIF map o' the world from the wikipedia archives (sure we have one somewhere) and draw squiggles on it. Connect most of the major developed societies to your squiggles and you'll probably be closer than attempting to draw a proper diagram would get. --Cynical 22:25, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I sent a mail to Hal Burch from the Internet Mapping Project asking for a permission to use one of their images. Helix84 12:34, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Bill Cheswick, lumeta.com, copyright holder: "Actually, good idea. I'll check it out and put it in myself." 213.81.165.16 14:42, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Brilliant! Well done Helix, and thanks in advance, Bill. --Nigelj 14:30, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)

PSTN

I'm removed the reference to the PSTN (ie the telephone network) as an example of Internet culture. The telephone network may be many things, and it may deserve to be linked from here, but I don't see how it's an example of Internet culture. Roybadami

prior proprietary art

Some other popular services of the Internet were not created this way, but were originally based on proprietary systems. These include ICQ, AIM, CDDB, and Gnutella.

Are CDDB and Gnutella really based on proprietary systems? AxelBoldt 07:18 Jan 7, 2003 (UTC)

CDDB was originally thought to be open, until its owner changed the license--inspiring a replacement (freedb.org). Gnutella was developed by Nullsoft (subsidiary of AOL) with the apparent intention of releasing the source under the GPL. They never got the chance--AOL shut the project down the day after they made the binaries available for download and barred Nullsoft from working on Gnutella. So the protocol was reverse-engineered and Gnutella clones created instead. So, in a sense, the Gnutella clones are working off a proprietary protocol (as AOL owns it and won't help anyone use it). Draco
CDDB may be true but as Gnutella was released on Nullsoft WWW under GPL it is now under GPL IMO.
-Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley 12:59, 2004 Nov 29 (UTC)


What is the basis for suggesting that IRC was based on a proprietary system? It was designed as a replacement for the unix talk command which was proprietary in a way, but AFAIK IRC has always been an open standard documented by RFC's.

I belive you are coorect about IRC exfect for a few things. Some of the IRC related specifications such as CTCP, are not IFAICT specified in RFC's, but are still open standards nonetheless. There is alos quite a bit of Standardization for IRC that is not formal, such as the user modes and channel modes, which are usually implemented similarly between different servers (and clients). So it is an open standard, but some parts of the standard is only implied, having never been written as a formal standard.

Flash

Anyone considered posting anything about Flash Animations? They are a major part of internet culture... at least now a days.

See Flash. This is a relatively minor sub-set technology of the WWW, which itself is a sub-set of the Internet... Just goes to show, we need to tackle this confusion over what's what and what's part of what in this area. How do you do those right-hand side info-boxes that show related articles and how they relate to this and each other??? --Nigelj 17:09, 28 Nov 2004 (UTC)


Make a Category: Internet Techologies? That way we could have various split pages, e.g. ARPAnet, the development of the internet, the advent of broadband, as well as stuff like html and flash, all on their own pages rather than the massive ugly USELESS MESS that the Internet page is right now. --Cynical 22:21, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Internet and Nuclear Warfare survivability

The claim about the ARPANet having been built as a survivable control system is common, and flat wrong. Baran's original work on packet switching was motivated by that, but not the ARPAnet. See DARPA's own history book, listed on the ARPANET page. Noel 15:30, 8 Nov 2003 (UTC)

The claim, in the "Internet survive nuclear war: Myth!" link, that the Internet was

NOT intended or designed to be a military communications channel, and was never designed to survive a nuclear war. It was built so that scientists working on DoD-funded projects didn't have to travel to use the biggest computers.

is also incorrect. Part of the problem is that people are conflating the ARPANet and the Internet, which were two entirely separate projects, with different goals, started and staffed by different people entirely. E.g. The statement about "built so that scientists .. didn't have to travel" is true of the ARPANet, but not of the Internet.

As to whether the Internet was intended to be used as "a military communications channel", and whether it was designed to be used as a strategic (i.e. nuclear weapons) C^2 (command/control) channel, well, to start with, those are separate questions, with separate answers.

As to the first, the Internet technology came into existence (as the "History of the Internet" article discusses) to allow the military to connect a bunch of test-bed tactical packet data networks, including a packet radio network which was demoed at Ft. Bragg in the late 70's / early 80's. So it definitely was intended in part for use as a military communications channel. So that email was wrong there. There was a significant military aspect to the project - I remember numerous briefings which touched on things like C3^I (command, control, communication and intelligence) and other military-specific application information. The people working on the Internet project then (including me) knew full well it would see operational military use (i.e. not just non-combat roles like logistics) - but understood that it was "dual-use" technology that we could use in the civilian environment (academic, business, etc) as well.

The answer to the second is murkier, without (AKAIK) a clear yes/no answer, and I suspect also in part classified. I do know that there were proposals to study the construction of a "survivable" strategic C^2 system using Internet technology for the communications substrate (it also used replicated distributed databases, etc) - but that was just a proposal to study an idea. Whether the military intended, at that point in time, to do anything in the long run with Internet technology on the strategic C^2 side I just don't know - and I'm not sure there is a definite answer. My guess would be that it would be the kind of thing where once it was available, they'd look at it and see if it made sense for them, in their context. The people working on Internet technology certainly had that potential application in the back of their mind - we occasionally made jokes about it. I personally gave it some thought before working on it - and decided it was OK because the whole point of a survivable strategic C^2 system is to be survivable - i.e. inherently a retaliatory system.

I suppose I ought to dig up documentation for all of this, and add a section to the appropriate article, but that will have to wait for another day.

Noel 22:40, 26 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Why wait for documentation? If you're the primary source, why not just pop it on in there?!! Tsavage 03:56, 22 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Why --References-- ?

Why were the last set of external links added under a References section? Bevo 03:42, 18 Feb 2004 (UTC)

They are references which were used to create the article. Anthony DiPierro 03:45, 18 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I think they should still go below the links to other wikipedia articles, like other external links. --Shallot 09:24, 18 Feb 2004 (UTC)


Internet culture?

I think we should move the "Internet culture" and "Legal and moral issues" content in this article into the Internet dynamics article. - Bevo 19:15, 14 May 2004 (UTC)

I agree - as it is the "Current and potential problems" section takes up about half of this article. The 'Internet' article reads like quite a negative description. It could really be the top page in an Internet 'tree' of articles, to include many existing www and Internet history, technical, and social pages. --Nigelj 00:14, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Hey, go for it! I agree that these sections have gotten kind of long, and could benefit from being separate articles (with brief summaries, and pointers to them, here - as with History of the Internet). Noel (talk) 02:21, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)
I agree as well. After linking here from another article and perusing it for the first time, I felt kind of depressed! --mh 21:45, Dec 2, 2004 (UTC)

Internet vs internet

Here's a nice counter-example which is much closer than the "God" example in the article: Doctor. There are both specific doctors and the use of the word as a name. So I can say "I'm going to the doctor." or "Hey, Doctor, what do you think is wrong with me?". The former is the general term. The second is a proper name. This is perfectly normal in English. A proper name can be the same as a generic term. I can name my cat "Cat". Would you then argue I should not capitalize his name?

As another note, there is indeed more than one internet on the planet. The Internet is the big one, but any catenet is a small-i internet and there are plenty of them that do not interconnect to the Internet. --Pmetzger 18:36, 16 Aug 2004 (UTC)

A counterargument to the argument '"Internet" is sensible but "the Internet" is not': some proper nouns are normally prefixed by "the"; e.g., the Netherlands

the internet is the connection of the most intranets in the world. it is the one and only, but it is used too commonly for it to be capitalized.

The United States of America. The United Nations. the presence or absence of the definite article has nothing to do with it.
An internet is a network of networks. There are many internets, and a lot of them have no connection to the Internet at all. One specific internet is referred to by the proper noun "Internet". It may have been a bad idea to call it "the Internet", but that's its name, just as the name of the united nations organization headquartered in New York is the United Nations.
basically, here's how I would split the idea. Do you call it "the Internet" or "a internet"... --128.175.100.74 19:29, 16 Aug 2004 (UTC)

(that should be "an internet")

I think it's worth mentioning that in the IHT article linked from the Slashdot article, it's suggested that the main reason for the capital I is that Microsoft Word automatically capitalizes it.

"[I]t is used too commonly for it to be capitalized"

That seems like a silly argument. Should Mike be written as mike because it is a commonly used name?

I notice that in French people often refer to Internet (with no article), which sounds/feels like a brand name. So, instead of saying "j'ai vu un bon article sur l'internet", they say "j'ai vu un bon article sur Internet". This shows the way the non-techie public thinks about the net (which they also interchange with the web): it's a product which you purchase from AOL, British Telecom, France Telecom etc.
I say it should be written "internet" (with no capital), and in French it should be l'internet (with article, with no capital) to discourage this thinking. --munro

There are many internets in the world which are not connected to the Internet - and only one Internet. Sentences such as "the internet of intelligence agency <foo> is not connected to the internet", while eventually parseable (albeit allowing of confusion), looks downright ugly if "the Internet" is not a proper noun (i.e. capitalized).

When the people who created internets and the Internet created the terminology (and this group included some very scholarly people, it wasn't a bunch of clueless geeks), we very carefully thought all this through, and it's the way it is for a good reason. (I had to laugh at the reference above to Microsoft Word; the author of the article is clearly complete clueless. Gates hated the Internet, and had to be dragged into it screaming and kicking. The terminology long predates any association with the Borg from Seattle.)

The BBC guy had it exactly right. Noel 01:53, 11 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Might be a stupid question, but DOES IT ACTUALLY MATTER AT ALL? We all know what someone means whether they say 'the Internet', 'the internet', or whatever, just like you know that when someone says 'the USA' or 'the US' or 'America' you know what they're talking about. GET REAL FOLKS. --Cynical 16:36, 12 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Yes, it is a stupid question. The word is used throughout the article and the outcome of this discussion will determine its capitalization, which is a far better solution than not establishing a standard and letting inconsistent use in the article. - Centrx 18:53, 12 Sep 2004 (UTC)

My vote is for a lower-cased i. "The Internet" seems to be much less common than "the internet". Also, I think there are other parallels in the English language with other global networks such as the telephone network. There are several telephone networks but only one global network, yet nobody calls it "the Telephone Network" AFAIK. There isn't quite a global road network, but if there was one I doubt it would be called "the Road Network". In any case I think the topic needs some discussion in the article. Rls 18:47, 2004 Nov 24 (UTC)

The Grid

Anyone know anything about The Grid - the future replacement for the present Web/Internet, currently being developed?

I've scoured the Internet (via Google) but to no avail - perhaps it's all so hush-hush that there's nothing been released about it yet....

I am assured that this is in development at CERN and is eventually intended to be a super-Internet for the next generation. Any further info would be appreciated - this should surely be mentioned in one of these articles.

Agendum 09:03, 1 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Is there any evidence at all that such a thing exists? - Centrx 05:12, 5 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Grid computing is a name for 'seamless and scalable access to wide-area distributed resources' ([1]). This is a generalisation of ideas that originated in things like the SETI@home project: Computers on a network, intranet, internet or the actual Internet contribute computing power as required and as they have available to some other requirement. This is not a replacement for the Internet or the Web, but is becoming yet another new way of using them. - --Nigelj 23:32, 14 Nov 2004 (UTC)

the usage of "the Internet"

Trollminator, I do not believe the usage of the phrase "the Internet" remains controversial, it's a perfectly legal thing that I've never seen anyone object to. In fact, I've only seen it be explicitly advocated by techies... --Joy [shallot] 19:09, 22 Nov 2004 (UTC)

This has been extensively discussed - see above. One thing I will disagree on - it's not fair to divide it as techies/non-techies. Some who call for "Internet" are "techies" (like me), some who call for "internet" are non-techies. Noel (talk) 21:28, 22 Nov 2004 (UTC)
I don't actually see too much discussion here... and it doesn't explain how the usage of "Internet" (with or without the "the") is "controversial". It's the use of "internet" when referring to this biggest internet that can be considered controversial because it changes existing practice.
And it's mildly amusing that it's people like the Jargon File writers who documented this practice of using the uppercased initial letter, rather than the random newspapers which tend to uppercase words for no actual reason. --Joy [shallot] 22:26, 22 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Huh? Not "much discussion"? Half this page is about Internet/internet - see the big section at #Internet, internet, internetworking, ..., and another at #Internet vs internet. So I'd say that clearly there is some controversy about it.
As to the Jargon file writers, they had absolutely nothing to do with it. As I carefully explained above, "the people who created internets and the Internet created the terminology .. we very carefully thought all this through, and it's the way it is for a good reason".
I'd say "'Nuff said", but clearly it hasn't. Noel (talk) 00:26, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)