Motorized transportation is one of humanity's greatest inventions. However, when the world allowed its unrestrained misuse, it eventually became mankind's worst invention. Mankind is once again reaping the benefits of a greater new invention—the internet. And, once again, this remarkable new invention runs the risk of becoming mankind's worst creation.

Motorized transportation transformed our way of life in numerous ways. It shrunk the world by allowing people to travel, work, live, and do business in previously inaccessible places. It has created and distributed wealth, both material and intellectual, for individuals and nations.

In retrospect, after the development of motorized transportation, humans had two choices. Consistently constructing sizable public transportation networks (railways, trams, bus networks, commuter boats) that would serve towns was one possibility. The second choice was to let each person handle their own transportation requirements.

Nations had (and still have) the chance to acknowledge and regard motorized transportation as a public requirement that should be used to benefit communities rather than just affluent individuals. The choices were analogous to having a water system that serves the entire community against letting each household dig its own deep well and either keeping a power plant that delivers energy to the entire community versus letting each household purchase its own generator.



We are all aware of the direction the world has gone. Nations failed in their duty to turn mechanical transportation into a public good and instead permitted the unchecked expansion of private transportation as a kind of opulence. Huge portions of public money are annually spent on building, repairing, and maintaining roads, and enormous amounts of the world's valuable natural resources (oil, metals, and minerals) are exploited to produce and run private vehicles. Vast areas of our limited land resources have been dedicated to roads and parking spaces.

When weighed against the costs to society and planet Earth, the private car industry has been more responsible for pain than happiness. However, there were benefits to mankind from other technologies and enterprises that were brought about by its growth.

With relation to the internet, humanity is once again traveling down the wrong road while using motorized transportation. The internet's enormous impact on humanity and its potential to significantly raise standard of living are hardly acknowledged. The internet's significance as a new "superhighway" that has greatly improved humankind's capacity for virtual travel, employment, education, and commerce is largely underappreciated.

Our government's lack of interest in building publicly funded infrastructure that offers public internet service to the entire country, in the same way that electricity and water services are regarded as public utilities, reflects how little our nation values the internet as an epoch-defining tool for the common good. It may be seen in our government's lackadaisical attitude toward taking on the responsibility of policing our nation's online presence. Our government has given private businesses the authority to determine the function and character of the internet in people's lives by ceding both of these responsibilities to them.

The internet is being left to business conglomerates to exploit for profit, just to how private firms were allowed to advertise mechanical transportation as luxury personal vehicles.


Additionally, the exponential growth of the world wide web is not exactly promoting the common good, just as the global proliferation of nearly a billion private transportation vehicles has not improved public welfare. In actuality, the internet has fostered lies, animosity, exploitation, and pervasive dejection.
The world's governments and all of humanity must collaborate in order to repurpose and retool the internet and motorized transportation, two of the greatest human inventions, into true tools that serve humankind.