IP Addresses, Internet Organizations, Governments, Power, and Life

My IP Address, The Global Empire, and Why None of It Probably Matters

By a Hypocritical CSE Student, Assisted by the Very Machine He Fears

So, here’s the first and most important thing to know: I’m writing this with the help of an AI. Or more accurately, I’m telling an AI what to write for me. This is the central joke of my life right now, and you need to understand it from the start.

I’m a second-year Computer Science and Engineering student at the University of Moratuwa. My whole world is technology. I’m being trained to build the very systems I’m about to question. And I am fed up. This feeling of being trapped in a machine I don't fully believe in is what led me down this rabbit hole, which started with a simple, technical question.

It all began when I asked an AI: "When a website shows my IP, is it my device's IP or my router's?"

It told me it was the router's public IP. My device gets a private one inside my home network. The router uses something called NAT—Network Address Translation—to manage the traffic, using port numbers to make sure data from the internet reaches my laptop and not my phone. It’s a slick, efficient system.

But my brain, trained to look for flaws, immediately asked: "Can the router ever mistake which device to send the data to?"

The AI assured me it's nearly impossible. The combination of IP and port creates a unique "socket," and the router's NAT table is like a perfect traffic cop. It’s incredibly reliable.

This led me to ask, "Well, why do we even have port numbers? Like localhost:3000?"

The explanation was elegant: an IP address finds the building, but the port number finds the specific apartment. It lets one computer run many services at once. My web browser goes to port 443, my email client to port 25, and my local development server runs on port 3000. Without ports, it would be chaos.

And that’s when my thinking started to slip. I began to see a pattern, a hierarchy of control.

I mapped it out: sub.domain.com:port/path.

• The subdomain decides which server in the world to talk to.
• The port decides which application on that server should respond.
• The path decides what specific page or function within that application to show.

It’s a perfect, logical chain of command. But this logical system exists in a very illogical world. My questions drifted from technical specifics to the architecture of power itself.

The Illusion of a Decentralized World

I asked who controls these IP addresses. Who makes sure the same one isn't given to two different companies? The AI described a global hierarchy: IANA at the top, then Regional Internet Registries (RIRs), then your local ISP. It’s a pyramid, ensuring every public IP is unique. When you pay your internet bill, you're funnelling money up this pyramid, funding the entire global infrastructure.

And then I asked the real question: "Who has authority over these companies? Can governments just shut down ICANN or the RIRs and turn off the internet?"

The answer was that no single government can. The internet is a "decentralized network of networks." ICANN, which manages domain names and IP addresses, is governed by a "global multi-stakeholder model," not by one country.

And this is where my CSE-student skepticism kicked in. I called it out.

I said, "ICANN is US-based. That means even though you say there is no power for the US over this, there is. As with most stuff in the world... powerful countries force smaller countries to do stuff. You can't deny this, it's a very well-known truth."

Let's be real. Decentralization is often a beautiful idea that gets mugged by reality in a dark alley. It’s a gimmick. The formal power might be distributed, but the real, muscle-and-money power is not. Think of it like a company with 100 shares. If 45 are with the company, and 55 are spread among 100 small investors, it looks distributed. But if one person secretly owns all 100 of those investor companies, he effectively controls the 55 shares. Who's the real owner? The structure is a facade. The power was concentrated all along.

Why the US Holds the Levers (And Why China is the New Challenger)

So why does the US have so much power? It’s not one thing; it’s a perfect storm built over decades.

First, it’s the economy. The US dollar is the world's reserve currency. This means when your country buys oil or sells coffee, you're probably doing it in dollars. This gives the US a financial veto. If they don't like you, they can cut you out of the global banking system.

Second, it’s the military. The US spends more on its military than the next ten countries combined. This isn't just for show; it's the ultimate enforcer of a global order that benefits them.

Third, and most relevant to me, is technology. The foundational companies of the modern internet—Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta—are American. They set the standards. They control the platforms. They hold the data.

This brings us to the US-China rivalry. It’s not a comic-book battle of good versus evil. It’s a clash of two empires who both know the game. The US built its empire within the system it created. China is now building its own, parallel system. They have their own search engines, their own social networks, their own tech giants like Huawei.

When China bans US services and builds its own, the US gets mad. Why? Because it’s a direct threat to their control. It’s not about freedom; it’s about market access, data, and the power to set the next generation of technological rules. The US response—rallying allies, imposing sanctions—is the established empire trying to discipline the rising one. It’s the same old story, just with fiber optic cables and microchips instead of coal and steel. Funny enough, I used China's Deepseek to write this article, because both Gemini and ChatGPT failed at reading the entire chat and giving out a proper detailed article that reflects my thoughts, either the article was too complicated, or too cringe with the obvious giveaways of being AI written.

The Pointless Race and the Simple Life

And for what? This is where my technical curiosity fully transformed into an existential one.

What is the point of this entire race? We're all just running towards something, but we don't even know what it is. More money? More power? More advanced tech? It will never be enough. We will die, and none of it will matter. The only thing we truly need to survive is food. So why don't we just stop? Why don't we go back to simple lives, to farming, and opt out of this insane, global competition?

Life itself feels useless in the face of this. We are born, we struggle, we acquire, and then we die, leaving it all behind. From a cosmic perspective, it’s all a brief, frantic noise in an immense silence.

The Unbeatable Logic of Medicine and Fear

But then, I confronted the biggest hole in my own argument.

I thought, "Okay, simple living is good." But then I thought about disease. And that thought immediately brings up medicine and technology. We aren't rational beings who can just accept death. We are terrified of it. We are devastated when we lose loved ones.

And that technology—the medicine that cures us, the scans that find tumors early—doesn't come from a simple farm. It comes from the heart of the complex, competitive, capitalistic "race" that I find so pointless. It requires global supply chains, billion-dollar research labs, and a competitive drive to be the first to discover a new cure. The MRI machine that saves a life is a direct product of the system I'm criticizing.

Our irrational, beautiful, human fear of death is the engine that drives the entire technological empire forward. We race because the prize is more time.

What Buddhism Gets Right (And What I Get Wrong)

I even explored the Buddhist perspective. The core idea is powerful: life is suffering, and suffering comes from attachment. If we could truly live like the Buddha and let go of all attachment, we would accept death with peace. We wouldn't need medicine to desperately cling to a life we know is temporary.

But the AI gave me a more nuanced view. The Buddha himself was called the "Great Physician." He didn't tell people to suffer in silence. He offered a cure for the mind's suffering. The Buddhist tradition encourages caring for the sick. Why? Because a healthy body and a life free from agonizing pain provide the best possible conditions to practice wisdom and compassion.

The goal isn't to achieve immortality, which is impossible. The goal is to use tools like medicine to alleviate temporary suffering, giving us the clarity and time to understand the deeper nature of life before we die. It’s not a rejection of help; it’s a wise use of it.

Trapped in the Paradox

So, here I am. Trapped.

I am a CSE student, knee-deep in the code that builds this system, yet I am deeply skeptical of the power structures, the pointless race, and the ultimate meaning of it all. I see the hypocrisy of using a multi-billion dollar AI, trained by a giant corporation, to write a critique of the technological empire. I accept it. I am part of the machine.

I am lazy. I don't have the discipline to write this article myself, but I have ideas that I desperately need to put out there. I want people to read this. I want them to see the contradiction not just in the world, but in me. A student of the system, funded by the system, using the system's most advanced tools to ask: "What is this all for?"

This article, crafted by the very technology I question, is my confession and my critique. We are all participants in a race we didn't choose, driven by fears we can't overcome, building a future we can't fully control, all while wondering if any of it means a thing in the end.

And the most frustrating, beautiful, and human part? We'll probably never stop.