The Internet is going the way of the Weblog, the Electronic Message and the World Wide Web.

The New York Times announced on Tuesday that it would join The Associated Press in lowercasing the name of the global network that lives in our pockets and in front of our faces, keeping us pinned to various feeds like caged mice pressing the button that summons another hit of sugar water.

The changes will take effect at both news outlets on June 1 (which explains the incongruity of “Internet” being capitalized throughout this article).

Jill Taylor, who manages the copy desks at The Times, announced the change in a memo to the newsroom, acknowledging, “It will probably take a while to get shift-I out of our muscle memory.”

The Times’s decision comes after an announcement by The A.P. in a tweet in early April during the 2016 conference of the American Copy Editors Society, the annual event where the “grammar geeks, punctuation freaks and syntax-obsessed snobs” (as its website says) drill their fellow editors on the latest rules governing American journalese.

Thomas Kent, The A.P.’s standards editor, said the change mirrored the way the word was used in dictionaries, newspapers, tech publications and everyday life.

“In our view, it’s become wholly generic, like ‘electricity or the ‘telephone,’ ” he said. “It was never trademarked. It’s not based on any proper noun. The best reason for capitalizing it in the past may have been that the word was new. But at one point, I’ve heard, ‘phonograph’ was capitalized.”

Mr. Kent noted that Webster’s New World College Dictionary, which The A.P. and The Times look to for guidance along with their stylebooks, was changing its first entry for Internet to lowercase the i.

Ms. Taylor agreed that a lowercased Internet was becoming more common in everyday language and said that The Associated Press’s shift had sealed the deal for The Times.

“One of our guidelines is prevailing usage — it’s not always to be out on a limb,” she said. “Now that A.P. has changed and all of their client newspapers are going to be following that same style, it’s a little more seamless.”

Ms. Taylor said that the change had been discussed with The Times’s technology reporters, people for whom the Internet is native territory, and that it did not trouble anybody.

But while many digitally savvy writers have argued on behalf of lowercasing Internet — an author at New Republic penned an article proposing the change in July — changes to the A.P. stylebook often occasion outrage from language lovers in the same way, for example, that changes to the Facebook news feed or the Instagram logo prompt protests.