En route to setting aside Lori Drew's conviction for a misdemeanor violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, Judge George Wu paused briefly to ponder a pair of style problems. Should the terms "internet" and "website" be capitalized? Should "website" should be written as one word ("website") or two ("web site")?
Judge Wu decided in favor of "Internet" by resorting to case precedent, noting that the term appears capitalized "most often" in U.S. Supreme Court opinions. The judge never explained his thinking on the Web site/website/web site trilemma, though he elected to use "website" throughout his opinion.
Judge Wu, I think, was only half-right. "Internet" is an acceptable choice, but "internet" is the right choice. "Internet" is a brown suit, "internet" is charcoal grey. Who wears brown suits anymore?
Words Matter, a Little
Lawyers rarely sweat the style stuff. Here in the publishing industry, however, style is a Big Deal. Consistency in prose style creates the appearance of a professional and well-made information product, and reduces the linguistic white noise that can distract a reader from the writer's message. And every publisher is blessed to count among its employees a person or two whose fervor for announcing and enforcing the One True and Correct Way makes the Spanish Inquisition seem like a pot party in comparison.
Style is fluid, not locked in time, subject to fashion and excess. Many hyphenated words begin life as coinage, the product of serendipitous, creative conjunction, then pass into common usage, shedding their hyphens along the way. On-line to online, cyber-security to cybersecurity, and soon e-mail to email.
With capitalization, familiarity breeds minusculization. Or so it seems. The clear modern trend is toward less capitalization, as Bryan Garner noted in his The Redbook: A Manual on Legal Style (West Group 2002). "Downstyle is easier to read: only words that require emphasis, according to standards set by rule, get emphasized. In legal writing, there is an unfortunate tendency toward contagious capitalization. It is a reversible condition." Well said. Here at BNA, we've been taking the high and mighty down a peg for years. We write attorney general, the president, and the court, meaning no disrespect at all, but rather in tacit fealty to higher stylistic authorities.
Lowercasing a word can be useful for striking a modern pose. To write "I looked up her number in my Personal Digital Assistant" is to reveal a pitiable unfamiliarity with tech gadgetry. "PDA" is better, "pda" better yet. I don't think e.e. cummings was the first writer to strike a disaffected, self-conscious, modern pose by dressing his verse in lowercase garb, but he certainly made the technique safe for mass adoption. Way back in 1996, editors at the str3nuously hiP Wired magazine published Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age, pea-green-paged content for the printosphere declaring that "Internet," "Web," and "Web site" were the correct way to "speak the culture" and "be elite." But times changed, the Web became commonplace, and Wired was caught with its stylistic pants down. So in 2004, Wired belatedly re-joined by cultured digital elite by changing to lowercase spellings of "internet" and "website."
Law Looks Backward, Language Forward
When it comes to word choice and style, the legal profession is faced with a conundrum. The law looks backward, language looks forward. The common law slowly picks its way into the future, navigating with a rearview mirror, while language leaps forward, poked and prodded by changed circumstances and our appetite for novelty.
In the Drew case, Judge Wu exhibited the legal profession's traditional approach. He looked backward. How do other courts spell these words? He cited the U.S. Supreme Court's opinion in Pacific Bell Telephone Co. v. Linkline Communications Inc., No. 07-512 (U.S., Feb. 25, 2009), where Chief Justice John Roberts consistently used "Internet" to describe the network of networks. Twelve years earlier, Justice John Paul Stevens, in ACLU v. Reno, 521 U.S. 844 (1997), the great granddaddy of cyberlaw cases, capitalized "Internet" and "Web site," both prevailing usages of the time.
The statute at issue in ACLU v. Reno, the Communications Decency Act (1996), employed the same style convention:
The rapidly developing array of Internet and other interactive computer services available to individual Americans represent an extraordinary advance in the availability of educational and informational resources to our citizens.
In 1998, Congress employed the more modern formulation of "website" in the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act:
The term "operator" ... means any person who operates a website located on the Internet or an online service and who collects or maintains personal information from or about the users of or visitors to such website or online service, or on whose behalf such information is collected or maintained, where such website or online service is operated for commercial purposes, including any person offering products or services for sale through that website or online service, involving commerce ....
In 2003, the CAN-SPAM Act retained the same style conventions ("Internet" and "website"):
Many senders of bulk unsolicited commercial electronic mail use computer programs to gather large numbers of electronic mail addresses on an automated basis from Internet websites or online services where users must post their addresses in order to make full use of the website or service.
So, as far as enacted legislation, Congress has spoken. "Internet" and "website" are the law of the land.
A visitor to the Library of Congress's Thomas website will discover that the term "website" (found in S. 800 and 88 other bills) is vastly preferred over "Web site" (H.R. 149 and just two other bills) among introduced legislation. In the case of "Internet" versus "internet," I could find only a single instance of lowercase "internet" among the 164 bills returned by my query for the term.
internet and website, Obviously
Congressional guidance notwithstanding, my personal preference is for "internet" and "website." I make no claim to digital elitism nor do I believe my grammatical choice has any cultural significance. Rather, this is where the language seems to be going, this is what the style schoolmarms demand, and it looks good too. (I also like it that "internet" suggests to the reader that I know what the internet is and that, in 2009, I am no longer golly-gee-whiz impressed by it and that I, heaven forbid, do not think it is a system of tubes.) Unfortunately, when I looked just now for external validation from the cool kids on campus, I found a dissatisfying disparity of opinion. A sampling some recent books by cyberlaw gurus revealed a mixed bag, inconclusive both for the fact that the style preferences among these authors are not consistent and for the fact that the usages I found in these books could well have been the decision of inhouse editors rather than the authors. (But what accounts for "website" in the Goldsmith/Wu title and the dowdy "Web site" three years later in Prof. Patry's book? Each was published by Oxford.)
- Goldsmith and Wu, Who Controls the Internet? (Oxford University Press 2006). Internet and website. "The Internet's design was unprecedented because it was open, minimalist,and neutral."
- Patry, Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars (Oxford University Press 2009). Internet and Web site. "Through the [Reuters] API, bloggers and other noncommercial Web sites can copy Reuters news content, create applications around it, or incorporate it into blogs and Web sites."
- Lessig, Code Verson 2.0 (Basic Books 2006). Internet and website. "Why should a website know anything about me if I go to that site to view certain content? You don’t have to be a criminal to appreciate the value in anonymous browsing."
- Zittrain, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It (Yale University Press 2008). Internet and Web site. "Even with some ongoing human oversight, the blacklists of objectionable Web sites maintained by commercial filtering programs are consistently overbroad, erroneously placing Web sites into categories to which they do not belong."
- Mueller, Ruling the Root (MIT Press 2002). Internet and Web site. "The hierarchy to the right of the domain name could be as shallow or as deep as the owner of the Web site wanted."
Finally, and changing gears a little bit, the Financial Times website is running a story today noting that television broadcasters are opting for "video" rather than "television" to describe their wares. This change reflects brand positioning, most likely, rather than language usage. Note however that FT is validating my style choice using both "website" and "internet" in the piece. Which makes me feel better. That's another thing about publishers and journalists: There's a herd mentality within our industy, but it's a cool herd. We think so anyhow.
Update: I neglected to mention that Profs. Bellia, Berman and Post were early adopters of the lowercase "internet," using it in their Cyberlaw: Problems of Policy and Jurisprudence in the Information Age (West Group 2003) casebook. "We must be acutely aware of the metaphors that lawyers and judges employ when thinking about internet legal issues." Also "web site," however.
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