The internet

A long read

The internet is a real place you could touch

Your guess

When you save a photo to "the cloud," where does it really go?

The internet feels like magic. It is not.

It is built from real wires, cables, and machines. You could walk up and touch those machines. They sit in real rooms in real cities.

All of it is the internet's infrastructure.

infrastructure

The real machines, wires, and buildings that make a big system run.

Sources

Cloudflare, "How does the Internet work?"
TeleGeography
Andrew Blum, Tubes
Cloudflare Learning Center, "What is a packet?"
Tim Berners-Lee, 1989 proposal (World Wide Web Foundation)
Mozilla MDN Web Docs, “Using HTTP cookies”

TeleGeography, "Submarine Cable FAQs" (checked 2026) — https://www2.telegeography.com/submarine-cable-faqs-frequently-asked-questions

TeleGeography, "TeleGeography's 2026 Submarine Cable Map" (2026) — https://resources.telegeography.com/2026-submarine-cable-map

TeleGeography, "International Bandwidth Demand Surpasses 6.4 Pbps" (2024 data) — https://resources.telegeography.com/used-international-bandwidth-reaches-new-heights

TeleGeography, "Do Submarine Cables Account For Over 99% of Intercontinental Data Traffic?" (2023) — https://resources.telegeography.com/2023-mythbusting-part-3

Submarine Networks, "Anjana" cable system record (Meta/Telxius, RFS 2024, 480 Tbps, 24 fibre pairs) — https://www.submarinenetworks.com/en/systems/trans-atlantic/anjana

Submarine Networks, "West Africa Cable System (WACS) Overview" (14,530 km) — https://www.submarinenetworks.com/en/systems/euro-africa/wacs/wacs-overview

Jeremy Norman's History of Information, "Louis Pouzin Coins the Concept and Term 'Datagram'" — https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=3728

Andrew Blum, interviewed in Data Center Knowledge, "Q&A: Andrew Blum on the 'Tubes' Powering the Internet" (2012) — https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/energy-power-supply/q-a-andrew-blum-on-the-tubes-powering-the-internet

TED Blog, "How does the Internet work? See how a continent gets plugged in" (identifies the Lisbon landing as WACS) — https://blog.ted.com/how-does-the-internet-work-see-how-a-continent-gets-plugged-in/

Andrew Blum, official book page for Tubes (2012), source of the "map it and touch it" line — https://www.andrewblum.net/tubes-2

IETF, RFC 5737, "IPv4 Address Blocks Reserved for Documentation" (2010) — https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5737

Google Public DNS, live A-record lookup for example.com (returns Cloudflare addresses, TTL 300) — https://dns.google/resolve?name=example.com&type=A

Policy Exchange (Rishi Sunak), "Undersea Cables: Indispensable, insecure" (2017) — origin of the $10 trillion/day figure — https://policyexchange.org.uk/publication/undersea-cables-indispensable-insecure/

The Webby Awards, "The Web and the Internet Are Not the Same Thing" — cited inline in section 5 but missing from source_references — https://www.webbyawards.com/features/the-difference-between-the-internet-and-the-web/

Read end to end and corrected: August 10, 2026. Numbers checked: August 10, 2026.