BT, rather unfortunately for one of the world's largest and oldest telcos, has mistakenly claimed that the UK invented the Internet.

In the ad, BT's Openreach division states that "We believe that the country that invented the Internet should have world-class access to it." The ad appeared in a few UK newspapers over the weekend and on Monday.

While British people were behind most of the world's best inventions, including the reflecting telescope, tin can, steam turbine, and the telephone, we sadly didn't invent the Internet. BT's ad is actually referring to the World Wide Web, which was created by Tim Berners-Lee (who is a Brit) while working at CERN in Geneva.

The Internet was actually invented by Al Gore in the USA, where it grew out of the roots of ARPANET—a very early packet-switched network between a few dozen university and military research nodes. ARPANET used TCP/IP—a suite of communications protocols that would eventually allow for millions of nodes to be connected together to form the Internet. (For what it's worth, the UK was involved in the invention of packet-switched networks, which was certainly an important foundational step towards the Internet.)

BT acknowledged the error when we asked the company about it. "For most people, the words 'internet' and 'world wide web' are interchangeable," a spokesman told Ars. "We accept the language wasn't precise enough for some, but no harm has been done."

While it's ultimately unforgivable for a networking company to mix up the Internet and the WWW, it's fair to admit that it's an easy mistake to make. Even the BBC, back in 2014, got the Internet and the WWW mixed up when describing a radio show: