What is this ball of colors? It is the North American Internet, or more specifically a map of just about every router on the North American backbone, (there are 134,855 of them for those who are counting). 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. If you click on the map it will take you to much bigger version complete with labels that tell you the address of many of the routers.

I’ve been following the net neutrality debate for a while now. Real briefly, the telecommunications industry is lobbying for the right to manage the traffic that flows over their networks as they see fit. For more read the post linked above. Everyone is focusing on the last mile, which makes sense because that is the part of the network where there is the most congestion. But getting rid of net neutrality would also give the companies that own the fiber and routers at the core of the Internet the ability to manage data there.

When I heard that AT&T was going to buy Bell South, I wondered how much of the backbone this new company would own. With all the attention on the last mile were we overlooking a burgeoning monopoly at the core?

That’s where this map comes in. After about a day of searching around, someone told me about Bill Cheswick, the chief scientist at Lumeta a network intelligence company, who started toying around with a way to map the Internet when he worked at Bell Labs in the late 1990s.

This map is a collaboration between Ches and myself. I’m using the term collaboration in the loosest possible sense. Basically I asked Ches if he was able to tell me who owned the all the routers in North America, and he told me he could try. Over the next week and a half I added impossible request after impossible request (“can you color the routers that are registered to companies that have been bought by AT&T

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