Comment by cduzz

Yes -- to some degree. And "AS" could mean "BGP AS" or it could mean "country or alliance of countries" -- the internet as seen in the west vs iran are likely very different things.

Maybe skynet uses one set of roots and thenet uses a different set of roots and freenet has taken the IPs of the roots and sends you to their dns heirarchy and they also mandate that you have their set of CAs.

But as of right now people don't carry different phones to communicate on different internets (though they do have different chat / voice communication applications / networks).

UUCP / bitnet were (are?) store-and-forward gateway mechanisms. "If you want to send email to that google address you have to send it as friend@gmail.com@@freenet_audit and it'll be forwarded if the filters approve."

My point is that there have been a variety of different internets in the past; this one got the name "the internet" but there's no reason it won't fragment (more) into a morass semi-incompatible fragments.