The topology of the Internet and its geographic properties received significant attention during the last years, not only because they have a deep impact on the performance experienced by users, but also because of legal, political, and economic reasons. In this paper, the global Internet is studied in terms of path locality, where a path is defined as local if it does not cross the borders of the region where the source and destination hosts are located. The phenomenon is studied from the points of view of two metrics, one based on the size of the address space of the autonomous systems where the endpoints are located and the other one on the amount of served population. Results show that the regions of the world are characterized by significant differences in terms of path locality. The main elements contributing to the path locality, and non-locality, of the regions and countries, are identified and discussed. Finally, we present the most significant dependency relationships between countries caused by non-local paths.

翻译：在近年来，互联网的拓扑结构及其地理特性受到了广泛关注，这不仅因为它们对用户体验的性能有深远影响，还出于法律、政治和经济等方面的原因。本文从路径局部性的角度对全球互联网进行了研究，其中一条路径若未跨越源主机和目标主机所在区域的边界，则被定义为局部路径。该现象通过两个指标进行分析：一个基于端点所在自治系统的地址空间规模，另一个基于所服务的人口数量。研究结果表明，世界各地区在路径局部性方面存在显著差异。本文识别并讨论了导致各地区和国家路径局部性及非局部性的主要因素。最后，我们呈现了由非局部路径引起的国家间最重要的依赖关系。