Should we still write Internet with a capital 'i'?

I just found an answer to this yesterday:<p>"An internet (lowercase “i”) is any collection of separate physical networks, interconnected by a common protocol, to form a single logical network. The Internet (uppercase “I”) is the worldwide collection of interconnected networks, which grew out of the original ARPANET, that uses Internet Protocol (IP) to link the various physical networks into a single logical network. In this book, both “internet” and “Internet” refer to networks that are interconnected by TCP/IP."<p><a href="http://www.morninj.com/2012/03/internet-or-internet/" rel="nofollow">http://www.morninj.com/2012/03/internet-or-internet/</a>

The capital is unnecessary for two reasons. First, common parlance does not distinguish any old <i>internet</i> from the global one. From a descriptivist standpoint, the battle is already over. Second, we already use an article to differentiate the two uses: <i>an internet</i> is to <i>a world</i> as <i>the internet</i> is to <i>the world</i>—not <i>the World</i>. Same goes for <i>a web</i> versus <i>the web</i>.<p>What <i>does</i> bother me is that it’s called the <i>World Wide Web</i> and not the <i>Worldwide Web</i>.

"I view it like a utility or books" isn't valid justification, it's an horrible misunderstanding that "the Internet" is the name of THIS network. Iran aims to create their own. And surely we'll have others eventually, we just haven't had serious consumer networks yet.

It's a shame that Google's trends tool doesn't allow us to compare case-sensitive terms. One could scrape through the first N results, but N would be an order of magnitude smaller than what a proper Google implementation could accomplish.

I thought we stopped doing that in 1995.

Question:<p>Does treating the Internet as a proper noun legitimize it relative to nation states? How about the opposite, i.e. does treating it a a regular noun delegitimize it relative to nation states?

Still? Why would anyone write 'internet' with a capital 'i'? Internetisapropernout.net is just <i>wrong</i>: it's not a proper noun; if it were, why would we precede it with an article?<p>If we capitalized any noun that referred to a specific thing, every word that followed 'the' would need to be capitalized.<p>The internet over which I'm posting this comment simply happens not to have a name.

I have always capitalized Internet and Web.

If you were at an institution with Internet2 connectivity, "the internet" would be ambiguous in a way "the Internet" isn't, perhaps? Anyone here part of such a group? For most of us though, it makes no difference and it wouldn't be the first time informal and formal usage have differed :)

The basic question is whether or not the word "Internet" is a proper noun (i.e. a specific named entity like the "Interstate Highway System") or just a regular noun like "public highways".

I do still write it with capital "i". What do you think?

I use a lower case "i". These days internet is just a common noun.

The Internet (the iPhone automatically capitalized it for me) is kind of like air - it's ubiquitous, and yet we don't see the word air capitalized.