> That's my whole point. You're thinking of it from an IP perspective where there are individual devices in some chain and they all need to autonomously figure

> That's my whole point. You're thinking of it from an IP perspective where there are individual devices in some chain and they all need to autonomously figure out a path from my laptop to AWS. The reality is every device between me and AWS is owned by my ISP. They know exactly which physical path ahead of time will get a message from my laptop to AWS. So why waste all the time on the IP abstraction? The ISP can internally use MPLS to do routing exactly the way you suggest: build a "circuit" between you and Amazon and then route the packets internally in their networks through this circuit, instead of using IP. This works because the ISP has a global view of their network and as such their routers don't need to work independently. MPLS was needed in a time where IP routing was too slow, but nowadays you can get full speed without MPLS. But anyway, it doesn't matter how packets are routed internally within each network, IP is still required for routing between different networks. Which is actually super common!