Centerfield

There's a major fallacy here. I was looking at Roman buildings, and thought "Two thousand years old! They sure built well, back then."

And then I checked into a history of Roman architecture. They built well, they built shoddily, they built all over the place -- just like we do. But only the ones they built well are still around for us to look at. And they are hardly a representative sample.

How many bridges the age of the Brooklyn Bridge are still around?

Although you are correct that the internet is a grand accomplishment of engineering, you are comparing apples & oranges. The reason we're not building things like the Brooklyn Bridge anymore is due to strangling regulations, especially for public structures. Between the NIMBYS, OSHA, environmental impact statements, unions, lawsuits by "aggreived" parties, etc., etc., etc., just try to build a structure as grand & magnificent even when it's desperately needed. The development of the internet had no such obstacles to overcome. Just come up with a brilliant idea, find out how to apply it, then apply it. That's it.
Think about it - it's not that companies don't want to build public use structures such as power plants, refineries, oil wells, even a new WTC. They can't - unless they have the smarts, stamina, cash, and political friends to actually see the project through to completion. Just a thought from a long-time construction industry guy.

Thanks Ellen for proving I'm not the only person to have noticed this. It applies fairly universally, basically if something wasn't built to last it didn't - whether it was 20, 200 2000 years ago.

Paulie, I'm sorry. Today's economy makes this is a pretty hard time for you guys, doesn't it?

It's true it's VERY hard to do innovative construction on Manhattan. And, for whatever reasons, most New Yorkers have decided they're tired of growing fast. But plenty of stuff is being built in AZ, isn't it? And cranes are hardly silent in Austin, Dallas, Houston, or Las Vegas, despite the economic slowdown. They just finished a big, big, long, freeway bridge here and most of a toll expressway. Though, the Ben White freeway bridge is hardly the challenge to our era that the Brooklyn Bridge was.

The equivalent, amazing amounts of Internet infrastructure, including lots of digging, lots of fiber cable, and some amazing routing points, has been built recently, and the pace continues strong. But it's designed to stay out of view.