The significance of capitalizing the Internet (which LIRNEasia religiously does) and latest effort to decapitalize it and bring it under the thrall of international bureaucracy:
What’s in an ‘i’? Internet governance – Technology & Media – International Herald Tribune
When David Gross heard last month that the International Telecommunication Union, a United Nations agency, wanted to lower-case the word Internet as a matter of official policy, he did not know whether to be alarmed or amused.
“We immediately thought, ‘Gee, what’s up with that?'” Gross, the coordinator for international communications and information policy at the U.S. State Department, said by telephone from Washington last week. “Who made the decision and on what basis? We didn’t have a clue if this was something insignificant or significant.”
But some others among the 2,100 participants at the union’s highest-level strategy meeting, which convened for three weeks in November in Antalya, Turkey, were more certain. They saw the move as the latest in a long-running effort by the organization to control the Internet, this time through a subtle yet symbolic imprint on the most powerful communications and commercial tool of the 21st century.
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Bruce Girard
Another take on capitalizing the “I” in internet came from Wired, which in August 2004 changed its style guide:
“Effective with this sentence, Wired News will no longer capitalize the “I” in internet.
At the same time, Web becomes web and Net becomes net.
Why? The simple answer is because there is no earthly reason to capitalize any of these words. Actually, there never was.”
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,64596,00.html