http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_capitalization_conventions
formal usage, the word Internet is traditionally treated as a proper noun and written with a capital first letter. Since the widespread deployment of the Internet Protocol Suite in the early 1980s, the Internet standards-setting bodies and other related organizations, such as the Internet Society, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the World Wide Web Consortium, use this convention in their publications. In English grammar, proper nouns are capitalized. However, critics argue that some things that are unique yet distributed, such as "the power grid", "the telephone network", and even "the sky", are not considered proper nouns, and are thus not capitalized.
Examples of media publications and news outlets that capitalize the term include The New York Times, the Associated Press, Time, The Times of India, Hindustan Times. In addition, many peer-review journals and professional publications, such as Communications of the ACM, and the American Psychological Association, in its electronic media spelling guide, capitalize "Internet."
Since the advent of the ’dot-com’ era, a significant number of publications have switched to using internet. Among them are The Economist, the Financial Times, The Times (of London), and the Sydney Morning Herald. As of 2005, most publications using internet appear to be located outside of North America although one American news source, Wired News, has adopted the lowercase spelling. Throughout the English-speaking world, including North America, lower-case "internet" is more prevalent than Internet in informal sources, such as blogs, personal web pages, and chat rooms.
In the Internet standards community, which includes the IETF, usage historically differentiated between the common noun (lower case first letter) and the proper noun (upper case). That is, "the Internet" referred to the Internet, while "an internet" (lowercase i) referred to any internetwork or multiple 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.
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 [sic] 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
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