The Internet is, as its name suggests, a network of networks. The glue that holds this together is the inter-domain routing protocol, BGP, or Border Gateway Protocol. BGP is a flooding protocol whose objective is to ensure that all the BGP speakers across the Internet see the same picture of reachable address prefixes. The paths of how to reach to each prefix is relative to each BGP speaker, so the paths contained in each local view of the Internet all differ to some extent, but the intention...
