It seems as though we’ve got ourselves a map of the internet, arrgh. Prepare yerselves fer battle! The treasure awaits!

CIO.com has published a map of the US internet that displays 134,855 registered routers about the country. It’s a huge backbone map, color coded to display who owns the internet and where. This goes along with the net neutrality debate that’s been going on, in which major service providors lobby congress to gain the ability to privatize the internet, going against the fundamental principle that the internet is an uncontrolled network of users doing what they need to do - use the internet.

The map, as stated, is color coded. Which is quite nifty, because you can find who’s giving internet where. CIO’s blog says this about the colors and who they belong to:

From blogs.cio.com/node/209:
The colors represent who each router is registered to. Red is Verizon; blue AT&T; yellow Qwest; green is major backbone players like Level 3 and Sprint Nextel; black is the entire cable industry put together; and gray is everyone else, from small telecommunications companies to large international players who only have a small presence in the U.S.

It doesn’t quite look the shape of North America, but you’ll get over that once you realize that besides this map being crazily large, also looks quite creepy. The web we’ve created looks almost sinister, like some sort of bubbling living experiment or culture of bacteria that’s growing and spreading. And when you put it that way and then look at the map, the internet feels like a very odd thing.

View this map now. (PDF)

Source.