When you do an internet search for “the internet”, particularly on stock image websites, you’ll come across a lot of images that look like this:

A search for “internet background images” gives even stronger results:

And when I use the arbiter of truth (ChatGPT) to generate an abstract picture representing the concept of the internet, I get:

And so on (GPT-5 Thinking):

And so on (Claude Sonnet 4):

Ok, you get the idea, and this probably isn’t news to you. People (and AI) seem to broadly agree that the internet has a colour and that colour is most definitely blue. But why? I can’t think of a particular component of network hardware that is known for being blue; I remember the phone lines my family would use to access dial-up internet back in the late 90s being white. Most search engines and browsers share a commanding blue presence in common(Internet Explorer, Edge, Bing, Safari, (old) Firefox, Chromium). Even electricity is generally depicted as being yellow (though to be fair, images of lightning usually look blue).

I was upsetedly curious, so I went down a little rabbit hole.

First, I wanted to trace the origin of design on the internet to see if I could pinpoint when this all started. In my search, I came across the aptly designed “Web Design: The Evolution of the Digital World 1990—Today”.