I gave roads as an example of a public good.

Your Superhighway metaphor-metaphor is getting further into the ether, without adding substance (unless you can make your statement about concrete more concrete).

Sometimes I wish there was an 'easy button' to figure out the context of comments.

Roads suffered from traffic congestion. So they're pretty rivalrous.

Roads are neither non-excludable nor non-rival. So they are in no way public goods. Therefore, they are irrelevant to the comment you were replying to by "thefool".

Assuming it's not LA traffic, roads are for all intents and purposes, public goods.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good

The article you are pointing to does not currently cite roads as an example of a public good, but it does give the definition I used above: non-excludable and non-rival. I didn't edit it. Tollbooths, roadblocks, and gated communities are a manifestation of the excludability of roads; traffic, traffic accidents involving more than one vehicle, and potholes are manifestations of their rivalrousness, to which we have responses such as traffic laws, road maintenance, gasoline taxes, rearview mirrors, and seatbelts.

In short, every aspect of how we interact with roads and cars is pervasively shaped by the rivalrous nature of roads, and their excludability profoundly affects many social institutions. Only in the most rural areas are roads even approximately non-excludable or non-rival.

Just routers and servers, and in the US, an army to stop people stealing copper wires.

Exactly! The existence of something like a reliable Internet depends on some form of physical civilization with laws and law enforcement, not to mention food production and distribution required to keep the netizens alive.

Will some aspects of life move from the physical to the virtual? Sure; they have and they will continue to some extent. However, there is a limit. Cyberspace cannot exist without physical space. If you want to ascend into some kind of purely spiritual existence, you need to look elsewhere than technology.

Mesh networks.

This is what I meant. You need something to force people to internalize externalities, and to provide goods that wouldn't otherwise get made.

Market failures are a real thing, and you need some sort of institution to address them. The internet does nothing to change this, except that it makes it possible to create more discriminating policies that are more efficient (in theory).

Market failures are an idea. An idea that the market is failing because someone isn't being provided with something that they want at the price they want.

You are saying that if a good isn't being provided, it's a failure. But who told you the market would give you everything you want for free? Who stops you from raising money for your pet project?