Wired is no longer capitalizing “internet,” “web,” and “net.”. Huh.
Why? The simple answer is because there is no earthly reason to capitalize any of these words. Actually, there never was.
True believers are fond of capitalizing words, whether they be marketers or political junkies or, in this case, techies. If It’s Capitalized, It Must Be Important. In German, where all nouns are capitalized, it makes sense. It makes no sense in English. So until we become Die Wired Nachrichten, we’ll just follow customary English-language usage. (Web will continue to be capitalized when part of the more official entity, World Wide Web.)
Ah. The final parenthetical sentence belies the snarkiness. In English, we capitalize proper nouns — the names of persons, places, or things. In that context, the unique construct known as the Internet probably does need to be capitalized. It’s the name of a place, or a thing (if not, yet, a person), unique, not generic.
I can see, when using it as an adjective (“let’s talk about web standards,” or “it’s difficult to make internet business sites prosper”) making it lower case. But why one would capitalize World Wide Web and not the Web, Net, or Internet, I don’t know.