[montasaurus]

That gets into a really interesting aspect of how the internet works. It's not really one entity, the way people sometimes think about it. In reality, it's a bunch of interconnected networks owned by different people like you mentioned. How it works is that you buy something called "transit", which is the right to send traffic to a neighboring network, who is then responsible for trying to pass it along to the destination network or to another intermediary network. Depending on where the traffic is going, this handoff process can happen multiple times before it reaches the destination.

Sometimes, the connections between these networks can get congested...or network owners can allow them to become congested as a way to extract payments from other network owners. This is what happened to Netflix. The different networks are called Autonomous Systems, and each one has a number called an ASN. The path a packet takes between those systems is called an AS Path. When networks interconnect, it's called Peering. Sometimes those peering agreements are settlement-free (no payments), and sometimes one network pays the other (like when you buy transit).