  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.
