Name As Internet Versus Generic Internets
The Internet standards community has historically differentiated between the Internet and an internet (or internetwork), the first being treated as a proper noun with a capital letter, and the latter as a common noun with lower-case first letter. An internet is any internetwork or inter-connected Internet Protocol networks. The distinction is evident in a large number of the Request for Comments documents from the early 1980s, when the transition from the ARPANET to the Internet was in progress, although it was not applied with complete uniformity.
Another example is IBM's TCP/IP Tutorial and Technical Overview (ISBN 0-7384-2165-0) from 1989, which stated that:
The words internetwork and internet is simply a contraction of the phrase interconnected network. However, when written with a capital "I," the Internet refers to the worldwide set of interconnected networks. Hence, the Internet is an internet, but the reverse does not apply. The Internet is sometimes called the connected Internet.
The Internet/internet distinction fell out of common use after the Internet Protocol Suite was widely deployed in commercial networks in the 1990s.
In the RFC documents that defined the evolving Internet Protocol (IP) standards, the term was introduced as a noun adjunct, apparently a shortening of "internetworking" and is mostly used in this way. As the impetus behind IP grew, it became more common to regard the results of internetworking as entities of their own, and internet became a noun, used both in a generic sense (any collection of computer networks connected through internetworking) and in a specific sense (the collection of computer networks that internetworked with ARPANET, and later NSFNET, using the IP standards, and that grew into the connectivity service we know today).
In its generic sense, internet is a common noun, a synonym for internetwork; therefore, it has a plural form (first appearing in the RFC series in RFC 870, RFC 871, and RFC 872), and is not capitalized.
In its specific sense, it is a proper noun, and therefore, without a plural form and traditionally capitalized.
Read more about this topic: Internet Capitalization Conventions
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