I actually came to the comments just to talk about this. Not the flip-flop in the article you're pointing out, but I've often wonder when the switch happened in

I actually came to the comments just to talk about this. Not the flip-flop in the article you're pointing out, but I've often wonder when the switch happened in general. Old articles and even TV[1] will use Internet without the definite article. Then, sometime in the mid-late 90's, we started placing 'The' out in front. My guess would be that techies originally did not use the definite article because other networks existed and had their own names. FidoNet, BITNET, etc. Thus 'Internet' was just a name to distinguish between other networks. Then, as the mainstream population started using Internet and saw that as the sole go-to network, it became 'The' Internet. [1] http://youtu.be/fxfhInhkvtM http://youtu.be/fxfhInhkvtM