  The original design of the Internet was a resilient, distributed system, that
maybe able to route around (and therefore recover from) massive disruption ---
up to and including nuclear war. However, network routing effects and business
decisions cause traffic to often be routed through a relatively small set of
Autonomous Systems (ASes). This is not merely an academic issue; it has
practical implications --- some of these frequently appearing ASes are hosted
in censorious nations. Other than censoring their own citizens' network access,
such ASes may inadvertently filter traffic for other foreign customer ASes.
  In this paper, we examine the extent of routing centralization in the
Internet; identify the major players who control the "Internet backbone"; and
point out how many of these are, in fact, under the jurisdiction of censorious
countries (specifically, Russia, China, and India). Further, we show that China
and India are not only the two largest nations by number of Internet users, but
that many users in free and democratic countries are affected by collateral
damage caused due to censorship by such countries.
