On April 2, 2016 the folks at the Associated Press Stylebook (via their @APStylebook Twitter account) tweeted news that many technical writers, journalist, English teachers, and other professional communicators have been expecting for a long time: “We will lowercase internet effective June 1, when the 2016 Stylebook launches.”
This post may seem strange to many, but “Internet” and “Web” were generally accepted as proper names, so they were capitalized. However, as technology evolves, so does language. This isn’t surprising. After all, remember when email was spelled “E-mail?” Not only was the ‘e’ capitalized, but the accepted spelling included the hyphen. E-mail evolved to e-mail, and before long, e-mail became email, which is the spelling we use today.
As an early career technical writer and technical communications director at the beginning of the internet as we know it, I relied upon various style guides (including old-school, paper-based versions of the AP Stylebook, the Chicago Manual of Style, and the Microsoft Manual Style) to help me choose acceptable spellings of new words, like internet (or Internet), Web site (which later became web site, and then website), Word Wide Web, the Web (or the web), and so forth.
Some of the style manuals stiff differ on their treatment of these internet-oriented words, but the AP’s move toward evolution should begin to create clarity and consistency.