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Two longtime students of the issue say, lowercase it in all USA newspaper and websites. The UK already does this, but most US newspapers follow the AP style and the NYTimes style and that is to CAP the word Internet. But these two professors, Steve Jones and David Park, say lowercase it. What say YOU? And backup your POV with examples and reasons.

Here's the professors' take. I agree, lowercase the word now. It's 2010 already!

TEXT BEGINS

There is no ‘I’ in ‘internet’


by Steve Jones and David Park

It’s a small thing, really. Whether or not to capitalize the
word ‘Internet’ is not the kind of issue that boils the blood or
starts a war. And yet, it is important, and the time has come to take
that capital I out of this utterly ubiquitous word.
When we capitalize a word, we signify it as something special
or unique. But there is nothing very special about the internet now.
As this year’s group of college graduates will attest, the internet is
as big a deal as television. Ho-hum. (To many of them the internet is
television, but that is a subject for another time.)
Proper names are capitalized, including brand names of
products. But as Joseph Turow, author of Niche Envy, points out, we
should not think of the internet as the kind of brand-name item that
its capitalization suggests. Capitalizing ‘internet’ makes it seem
like the internet is a private zone that we must buy into or rent, as
if we are visiting Disney World. Of course, the internet itself
(which was largely created by public funding) is owned by no one in
particular, which has been—and will hopefully continue to be—one of
the intriguing things about it. We have already realized that many
features of the internet are not words to capitalize; we already use
lower-case letters for words like web, e-mail, online, blog and
cyberspace. And yet, ‘Internet’ remains with us.
The situation can be compared with America in the late 19th
century, when it was not difficult to find the word ‘phonograph’
capitalized; the capital p then seemed to indicate that there was
something new about the word, something very different about the
experiences we would associate with this device. The internet has
been shrouded in the same sense of novelty, to which the capital ‘I’
testifies. Perhaps this lingering sense of novelty owes to the
internet’s seemingly strange lack of an obvious physical presence.
Unlike television, radio, or the phonograph, the internet is not a box
you can place in your living room. We connect to the internet through
the use of computers and some connecting line or wireless device, but
these boxes and wires don’t contain the internet, they only act as
connections to, or displays for, the internet. At the same time, the
internet does not come from a specified place, as do television and
radio broadcasts; to connect to the internet is very different from
switching on the local news.
However, this novelty of the internet has quickly faded.
Younger Americans do not approach the internet as something new or
special; it has become no more or less than another part of their
day-to-day experience. In this sense, the internet has become part of
the background. Like tap water, it can be simply turned on or off.
Even without the long-promised convergence of internet with other
media, the internet has managed to converge with the everyday lives of
an entire generation. The time of novelty—the time when it might be
understandable to capitalize ‘internet’—has passed.
The persistence of the upper-case I is largely a product of
newspaper publishers (many of whom didn’t capitalize ‘television’ or
‘radio’ when those media were new) and dictionary editors, who are
perhaps waiting for there to be some change in usage before they
change their prescribed sense of how ‘internet’ is to be spelled. But
for internet users (many of whom do not capitalize any words as they
type away in chat rooms and blogs) the internet is no longer novel, no
mere trend or gadget, and while it is especially useful it is
certainly not in need of special treatment. In this sense, then, it is
up to us. A switch to ‘internet’ will not solve all of our problems,
but it may reflect that we are now ready to absorb this medium, and
truly make it our own.

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AUTHOR ID: Dr Steve Jones is UIC Distinguished Professor and Professor of
Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Dr David Park is
Gustav E. Beerly Jr. Associate Professor of Communication at Lake
Forest College.