[codev]

The Guardian is pretty progressive in style terms. I think there's an increasing tendency to write it as internet and they're closer to the cutting edge than a more conservative (style-wise) newspaper like the NYT. Here are their capitalisation rules:

http://www.theguardian.com/styleguide/c#id-3043710

[hawkharris]

Thanks for taking the time to find and share this interesting guide.

I think that The Guardian is a very progressive paper in general, but I'm not sure that lowercasing "the Internet" is a progressive move.

The Internet is capitalized because it's a proper noun: not just any general network, but a specific global network of computers. [1] There is only one Internet. If an author is referring to a subset of the Internet, he or she should be specific and elaborate. E.g. Is the author talking about an intranet?

In other words, it seems that NOT treating the Internet as a proper noun perpetuates a misunderstanding about what it is and how it operates. It implicitly gives writers a license to be more vague in their description of computer networks.

But I'm curious to hear your take on this. What do you see as the advantages of lowercasing the word?

[1] http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/capitaliz...

[hmsimha]

In social network analysis, there's the concept of a giant connected component in a graph where edges propagate between nodes over time. That's essentially what I consider the internet to be. There's only one of them by virtue of giant connected component emergence in that kind of network. I've never viewed it as a proper name.