@danielbowen A claim that a certain percentage of Australian internet traffic from east to west goes via china or the USA is closer to a fact than a conspiracy theory.

The best route is indeed via the terrestrial or submarine cables, but due to terrible peering and braindead routing setups, a lot of internet traffic gets routed around the world though the USA and then back, just to get across the street (and usually you don't even notice, as light isn't slowed much by fibre and routers can now usually forward a packet within a few CPU clock cycles).

If you want to learn more, simply install GNU and try out the traceroute command like so; `traceroute <domain or ip address>`