

Should we still write Internet with a capital 'i'? - mirceagoia
http://thenextweb.com/media/2012/03/24/should-we-still-write-internet-with-a-capital-i/

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morninj
I just found an answer to this yesterday:

"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."

<http://www.morninj.com/2012/03/internet-or-internet/>

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bithive123
I like this approach; "I can't access the Internet, my internet connection is
down."

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mirceagoia
Yes, I like this too.

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evincarofautumn
The capital is unnecessary for two reasons. First, common parlance does not
distinguish any old _internet_ from the global one. From a descriptivist
standpoint, the battle is already over. Second, we already use an article to
differentiate the two uses: _an internet_ is to _a world_ as _the internet_ is
to _the world_ —not _the World_. Same goes for _a web_ versus _the web_.

What _does_ bother me is that it’s called the _World Wide Web_ and not the
_Worldwide Web_.

~~~
pagekalisedown
Speaking of which, in this day and age, I find it inexcusable for example.com
not to be a valid alias for www.example.com. (Are you listening old media??)

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evincarofautumn
Yeah, I always 301 the “www” subdomain to the real site. Some agree with
us[1], some disagree[2], and some disagree disagree[3].

[1] <http://no-www.org/>

[2] <http://www.yes-www.org/>

[3] <http://www.www.extra-www.org/>

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true_religion
The reason you should use a www.domain is because then you can serve static
assets from a cookieless domain. If you don't use a www-domain, then you'll be
setting cookies at root and they'll populate down to say static.example.com
too.

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marshray
But aren't there other aspects of same-origin policy that could bite you if
you outsource static.example.com too?

E.g., it may not stop static.example.com from setting malicious cookies at the
root.

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true_religion
> static.example.com from setting malicious cookies at the root.

It does. Subdomains can't set cookies for other subdomains. So long as you
don't read root cookies, you'll be fine even if you do put static.example.com
on some companies box that gets hacked without your knowledge.

However, outside of hacking (which is an issue no matter how you layout your
domains), I can't think of a single problem with www-.

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marshray
> So long as you don't read root cookies

I wonder how many web apps are coded to reject cookies from a parent domain
when they're expecting specific-subdomain cookies?

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true_religion
Now that you mention it... I looked did a little investigation and it turns
out you can't tell where a cookie comes from.

document.cookie in javascript just returns a string, and HTTP_COOKIE doesn't
have any identifying information.

So yes, you're right. I was wrong. You can get poisoned by cookies on a root
and there's really nothing you can do about it except hope that your browser
is smart enough to make prefer your good.example.com cookies as opposed to the
root cookies set by evil.example.com

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jeffool
"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.

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Lexarius
There's already Internet2. It's mostly for academics. My university is a
member, so file transfers with some other universities will go REALLY fast.

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JumpCrisscross
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.

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justgrimes
why not just look at the Google Books corpus (ie Google Books n-gram viewer)
[http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Internet%2Cinte...](http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Internet%2Cinternet%2Cseries+of+tubes&year_start=1985&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3)

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thought_alarm
I thought we stopped doing that in 1995.

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malandrew
Question:

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?

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marshray
I wouldn't think so.

I don't think there are very many people who would consider the internet to be
something that would ever be in the same category of thing with nation states
such that they could be related. 'The internet', even when used as a metaphor
to refer to some collection of humans, is far less tangible and definite
compared to a nation state.

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Gormo
Still? Why would anyone write 'internet' with a capital 'i'?
Internetisapropernout.net is just _wrong_ : it's not a proper noun; if it
were, why would we precede it with an article?

If we capitalized any noun that referred to a specific thing, every word that
followed 'the' would need to be capitalized.

The internet over which I'm posting this comment simply happens not to have a
name.

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ghc
Why is the White House preceded with an article? I don't think it's
significant.

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espeed
I have always capitalized Internet and Web.

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petercooper
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 :)

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_delirium
Since Internet2 doesn't have different user-facing characteristics, I don't
think most researchers distinguish, unless it's their area of research
specifically. From a user perspective it just looks like another set of long-
haul internet pipes, alongside both the commercial ones run by Level3/etc.,
and other educational networks like CalREN and NORDUnet. I don't even usually
know when my data is being routed over Internet2 or some other network unless
I make a point of tracerouting, and often it transparently takes some mixture
of routes.

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petercooper
_and often it transparently takes some mixture of routes._

Whoa. I always thought it was pretty much separate. Might have to go and hunt
down a documentary or something about this, seems an interesting topic.

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GiraffeNecktie
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".

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

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

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squadron
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.

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marshray
Yeah, 'air' is another word that's sort of nebulous about its extent.

"The bug in the jar is running out of air" c.f. "Don't pollute the air" (i.e.,
Earth's atmosphere)

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freehunter
Yes, but "air" is not really comparable, is it? You'd never find someone
saying "if we remove the wall from this room, we can make an air", or "you
have your air, I have my air, and we should connect them to the Air".

There can be (and are) multiple internets. Hundreds, thousands of internets.
There is only one Internet. The people who decide the nomenclature of the
technology should be the network engineers who have the knowledge to build it.
People who argue for "internet" don't seem to understand how internets work.

