And if it does end up getting the green light, the project would almost certainly get held up in a slew of lawsuits, challenging it on both environmental and jurisdictional grounds. But even beyond ...

The Opte Project, an Internet mapping initiative started in 2003 by ... allowing viewers to see how regions like Latin America have experienced explosive growth in Internet connectivity.

What do those look like? The Internet Map is an online project that seeks to visualize metrics like web traffic and linking between sites, and the result is a beautiful landscape of the web today.