The 20th century saw dirt roads turn into bitumen and concrete highways around the world. Massive government road building projects (and expropriation) constructed streets and highways across the western world and beyond. These roads were all billed to the taxpayer, with the promise being a massive increase in transportation and thus the economy. It was the century of gasoline and diesel. But this approach has been tapped out. New road construction seems almost like a relic as investors push NVIDIA shares beyond the trillion dollar mark and AI fever grips the business world.
Fibre optic lines, satellite Internet, and all the other infrastructure of the digital revolution seem like the highways of the 21st century. Yet governments largely don't build these, and government policy in many countries is now turning against the Internet. Under the banner of public safety, governments are restricting the Internet from various directions, including the introduction of a series of laws in Parliament in my own country, all aimed at reducing online freedom. The premise is that the Internet is a killer, but the number of people killed by the Internet is surely far less than that of road deaths in Canada. The reality of infrastructure is that big benefits aren't free. Roads kill people via the cars that drive on them, the pollution from their construction, and various other negatives that are simply accepted as the cost of boosting economic capacity.