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Four reasons why American media should lowercase 'Internet'

When the style desks of The New York Times and the Associated Press finally issue a press release about the need to start lowercasing Internet, we will know that America has finally woken up to web-based reality.

We don’t capitalize words like radio or television or motion pictures anymore, do we? Regarding the Internet, we are still behind the curve, behind the British, lost in capitalization land. We need to play catch up. Now.

Here are four reasons to lowercase “Internet”:

4. Americans invented the Internet, why can't we lead the way on style changes?

  • By Dan Bloom

The 2002 Times piece cites Allan Siegal, co-author of the authoritative "The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage," who felt "it would not be surprising to see the lowercase usage eclipse the uppercase within a few years." Maybe before 2011 is over?

I recently asked Philip Corbett, the associate managing editor for standards at The New York Times, who is also in charge of The Times’s style manual, about this issue. What, I asked him, is The Times policy on lowercasing or capitalizing words, especially the word internet (lowercase), or as the Times (and the Monitor) still writes it, Internet (caps). He replied in Internet time, saying:

“Our current style is to keep the uppercase I for Internet. I agree that the trend is toward lowercase, and I suspect that at some point we will review our style. But our preference is to follow established usage, not to lead the way. So I can’t predict when the change might be made.”

So, do we follow the Brits here, or do we lag behind for 10 more years?

Dan Bloom is a freelance writer from Boston now living in Taiwan. He has been based in Asia since 1991 and blogs at “The Angry Luddite.“ An earlier version of this piece first appeared at TheWrap.com.

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