Gene Buckley quoted this sentence from James R. Glenn, “The Sound Recordings of John P. Harrington: A Report on Their Disposition and State of Preservation”, Anthropological Linguistics 33(4): 357-366, 1991:
[NAA] also anticipates that, once data editing is complete, information about both the Harrington sound recordings and photographs will be available on INTERNET, to which the Smithsonian recently subscribed.
Gene noted that the use of INTERNET with no article is an interesting relic of 1991 usage, and observed that for him, ARPANET never made the transition to usage with “the” (or, apparently, to lower case).
I remarked idly that “on INTERNET” is like “on Facebook”, “on Google”, or “on Language Log”, and that when some elderly politician talks about looking something up “on the Google”, you know that he doesn’t quite Get It.
Geoff Pullum observed that
So Google, Language Log, and cyberspace are like Amsterdam and Vanuatu, while the Internet is like the Hague and the Solomon Islands. As I put it back in 2007 “Language Log is strong“.
Now, my default hypothesis is that this is a genuinely arbitrary syntactic distinction. There’s no explanation; the functionalists who (doubtless) will run around in circles trying to find a subtle semantic link between all strong proper names, and a subtle distinction between them and weak proper names, will be wasting their time. “The Internet” is a weak proper name, so the definite article is obligatory. End of story.
The question is whether anyone can propose anything to be said about this topic that can enliven my (admittedly rather dull) description and give it some semantic rationale or explanatory oomph. I am betting (though only a modest amount) that the answer is no.
Comments are nevertheless open.
[Further LL discussion can be found here, here, and here. And here.]
[And even if the distinction is an arbitrary one, there may be something to be learned by documenting the process by which recent words changed category, as internet apparently did.]