Fergus Cassidy

House style

IT'S a sure sign that the internet is coming to maturity. The Guardian, a newspaper not renowned for its adherence to dictionary diktats, announced recently that 'Internet' would not longer be carrying the capital I in the paper's book of style.

At the risk of finding myself in a glass hose, far be for me to throw a wobbler. Around here we've had our own fair share of arguments about which words should be capitalised or not. And don't get me started on italics.

For many years, a word beginning with a capital letter was generally used to indicate importance. If a word had a capital in the middle of a sentence then it was privileged and lofty. Whatever it was had made it and was successful.

That all began to unravel when the dotcom steamroller levelled all the capital letters in its path and equalised the alphabet. For a while, lower case ruled and symbolised the new world order.

The Guardian's decision has met with mixed reaction, those who care and those who don't. The tut-tutters felt the capital I was important for distinguishing and accuracy purposes; the Internet represents the global connection of communications devices while the internet can mean any group (small or large) of computers which are inter-networked together.

Those who agreed felt it was time to drop the capital I and gave the example of television. This word describes the medium or technology and also the device used for reception. It hasn't halted the rise of either. The Hoover hasn't fare too badly and Xerox put a machine in every office in the world without even trying or knowing.

Getting the capital letter lowered means whatever it is has entered the mainstream. Woven into the fabric of everyday life and hard to unthread. With the net (phew!) it's hard to argue with that. And yet I will.

While the internet (lower won the toss) has seeped further and further into our world, the changes it has brought have been understated or overlooked. But that doesn't matter because what's happened so far is only loose change in the currency of the net's evolution.

With only a decade for a vantage point, it's understandable that maturity is being confused with fully formed or grown up. Any maturing of the internet is but chapter one of a story that will probably make Tolstoy's 'War and Peace' seem like a short story but with more drama.

Up to now the internet has been a technological field of dreams. If it was like building a house, so far only the services have gone in. Sometimes rushed, sometimes fretted over, the net has been largely the domain of scaffolders, plumbers and electricians.

The foundations are solid enough and the services work well most of the time but we won't know for certain until the bricklayers, carpenters and decorators get stuck in. Not forgetting the accountants and lawyers, needless to say.

Capital letter or not, the internet is entering the phase where the size, shape and scope of the house will be tackled. And who lives there and what rooms they will get.

This is brand new territory which history can only partially help out with. The transglobal nature of the internet has precedents, especially in trade and treaties between sovereign governments.

But the world is unprepared for a communications system which brings challenge and change from outside a nation's borders.

To show the scale of what lies ahead, let me summon up a very different kind of Olympic games. These Games have athletes who represent their countries and athletes who run for companies or charities and independently as individuals.

Sometimes there's a mixture. What kind of difference would that make to who won a medal? What would the Games be like if nationhood wasn't central to its spirit? Would it work?

Unimaginable surely, but that's what at issue when it comes to finding a governing structure for the net. Its non-territorially based nature is unique to these times. The net's architecture consists of public and private, state and non-state and global and individual. Some of the important organisations are corporate and very traditional in structure and others are informal, open to all with no membership required.

The internet is not exclusively about trade and commerce and it's futile to try and govern it using previous methods based on the nation state controlling everything inside its sacrosanct borders.

The next phase of the net's evolution may force us to look more closely at how the world is run and who gets a say in running it. It may well be revolutionary in its consequences.

Or should that be Revolutionary?