The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is an organization that gives the whole world IP addresses. For example, back in the old days of IPv4, they told Africa (actually they told the regional Internet registry (RIR) organization of Africa. The world is divided into five RIR's) "Africa, from now on, every public address your continent has will start with 41, i.e 41.0.0.0/8" So Africa gets this address block plus a few more (there were 2^8 possible public address blocks the gets distributed between the five RIR's) and distributes it among it's entities in the African continent.
And wala! so neat and organized. Now we know what possible continent a IP belongs to just by mapping its first few bits.
IANA did this for IPv4 and is now doing it for IPv6.
I had always wondered where the internet starts.
