The Internet vs. Internet: there is some confusion when using NICT terms, especially in relation with the use or no use of the article. Is there a difference between the use and the omission of "the"? If so, what is the difference? The following explanation comes from a paper by Daniel Pimienta, presented at the Info-Ethics congress, Monte-Carlo, October 1998.

The context

Reading the newspapers, watching TV or listening to other media, it seems that the history of the Internet is exclusive to the United States of America, since the technology was born in the Department of Defense of the United States and was developed in that country. This is a partial vision of the history of the Internet, and the fact that it has been conveyed and replicated by a large number of media all over the world does not make it a truth.

The rationale

"Internet" (without article) is the name of a communication protocol (TCP-IP) which was conceived in the USA (while other protocols were developed in France or United Kingdom). "The Internet" (with the article) represents the set of interconnected networks, independently of their protocols, and its history is international. In this context, there is an easy (and frequent) confusion between the network, made by the users and services, and the protocol, a set of explicit rules designed to automatize the services. The history of networks has been written thanks to the cooperation of people from other fields than computer science, who have brought into the picture cultural elements with more impact than the nature of a given protocol (all the protocols offered similar functions: the WWW would have probably emerged anyway from any of them).

The conclusion

The MISTICA team thinks that the socio-cutural aspects of the network have played a more important place than the technical protocols in the history of the Internet and of the emergence of new forms of communication and information. The article will then be used in this project.