This might be a good post to ask this particular question: I am very unfamiliar with the nuts and bolts of how the Internet <i>actually</i> works. I understand DNS resolution, ports, HTTP protocol - all of the higher-level abstracted stuff that you need to know to program within the environment. However - route-maps? BGP? ASN? Whatever else is under the hood that makes it tick - no idea. What's a good book to learn all this stuff?
Interesting little fact, the BGP protocol and other bits related to propagating routing information will not converge to an answer in general, but will under certain conditions such as "no dispute wheel" (which can happen if the routing distances don't satisfy a triangle inequality[by which I mean some geometric notion of distance], though thats too strong an assumption about routing choices to be reasonable).