Yes. I know what a tree is, and I am quite familiar with structure of the Internet. These very pretty pictures certainly look like the Internet I am familiar with, but don't resemble trees.
It is a tree. I'll give you a hint. Think of this:
"God is like an infinite sphere, whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere." Nicholas of Cusa.
It is a tree, but to see it, you'll need to find the root. The quote above is a hint to where the root is. Replace god with internet, sphere with tree, infinite with 2**32 (at least until it goes to ip6.)
So where's the root? Scroll down for the answer.
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Did you see it? No??? It's actually right infront of you.
Still don't know? Ok then, keep scrolling down.
The root of the internet is your own internet connection. Proof: If you were to iterate traceroutes over the entire ip4 space (good luck doing that by the way), and graph the results, you'd get a tree. It's root is your default gateway.
:)
