Backbone Is Live: The Internet, Drawn as a Galaxy
Backbone opens today in the Lab: every autonomous system on the internet placed by who carries whom — transit cores in the bright center, stub networks in the dust rim — with live BGP announcements rippling across the disc as routes change somewhere on Earth.
In the CAIDA snapshot dated 2026-08-01, the internet is 80,575 autonomous systems joined by 522,984 known relationships, and the whole thing — positions, names, registries, customer cones, the 160,000 most important links — is 5,306,800 bytes of typed arrays, 2,311,833 after gzip. That one file is the entire topology payload of Vaynerov Project Backbone, which opens today: the internet drawn as a navigable galaxy, every network a star, lit in real time by BGP announcements from the RIPE route collectors.
The default way to draw a graph this size is a force simulation, and the default result is a hairball — a beautiful tangle that reshuffles itself on every load, so nothing you learn about it survives a refresh. The other easy road is embedding someone else's BGP widget and calling it a flagship. Backbone does neither. Every position is computed once, deterministically, in the build script: a network's angle is the longitude of its registered country plus a golden-angle jitter seeded by its AS number; its radius is 10·(1 − log1p(cone)/log1p(maxCone)), so customer cone — how much of the internet a network carries — decides how close it sits to the center; a seeded gaussian sets the height, thin in the core and thick at the rim; and a 0.55·(1−r/R)² swirl shears the disc into a spiral. The consequence is the point: a network moves only when its customer cone or its country changes. The galaxy you learn this month is the same galaxy next month.
The radius law makes the hierarchy legible before you know what you are looking at. The largest customer cone in the snapshot belongs to AS3356 — LEVEL3, registered to Level 3 Parent, LLC — at 57,394 networks, and the rest of the innermost core reads like the hidden middle of every traceroute you have ever run: GTT at 43,391, Arelion at 42,135, Cogent at 41,458, NTT at 26,070. Names come from RIPE's daily asn.txt — about 122,000 rows — and the 12,000 largest systems ship with theirs attached; registry and country come from the NRO's delegated-extended file, and each of the five regional registries tints its own stars.
On screen, the graph is two core draw calls: one THREE.Points star field carrying all 80,575 stars, and one merged LineSegments layer carrying the edges, rank-sorted at build time so quality tiers are nothing but drawRange cutoffs — 12,000 edges on low tier, 60,000 on medium, 120,000 on high. Neighborhood highlights come out of a preallocated 4,096-segment pool, live ripples out of an 8,192-particle pool, and nothing allocates per frame. The live layer is a direct browser connection to RIS Live, RIPE's BGP stream, subscribed to a single collector — the full firehose runs about 740 messages per second, and one collector is roughly a twenty-fifth of that, still several routing changes a second, around the clock. Announcements ripple violet outward along the AS path; withdrawals run inward in ember.
- Drag to orbit, scroll to dive, tap a star to identify it — name, country, registry, customer cone, and cone rank among all 80,575.
- Search for your ISP by name or AS number, then follow its links inward. The hops between it and the bright center are what your monthly bill is buying.
- Sit in the core for a minute. The handful of stars packed around the middle carry most of what the rim calls the internet.
- Watch a violet ripple cross the disc: that is a route being announced somewhere on Earth, right now. Ember running inward is one being withdrawn.
- Pause the stream if you want the galaxy still — the topology stands on its own, and the LIVE chip tells you which mode you are in.
It ships in six languages and runs on phones — the lower tiers draw fewer edges, never fewer networks, so the shape of the internet is the same on a three-year-old handset as on a desktop GPU. Like the rest of the Lab, it stops computing the moment the tab is hidden or the canvas scrolls away.
Backbone joins the Lab beside the Orrery, Tremor, the Reliquary and thirteen games, and like all of them it is free and needs no account: vaynerov.com/backbone. Open it, search for whoever sells you your internet, and watch the routes ripple past it.