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Somewhere between your thumb and that first frame, your request crossed maybe fifteen different companies' equipment, possibly an ocean, and came back. Nobody coordinated it.
That is the part I find genuinely strange about the internet, and it is the part most explanations skip.
They tell you the internet is "a global network of networks", which is true and tells you nothing. So let's actually take it apart.
The single most useful thing to understand up front: the internet is not a thing anyone built.
It is roughly 75,000 independent networks that agreed on how to hand traffic to each other.
They own their own cables and routers, they answer to nobody in particular, and they interconnect voluntarily.
Once you see it that way, every weird thing about the internet starts making sense.
The edge is everything that actually wants to say something. Your phone, a laptop, a server in a rack, and increasingly a doorbell. These are called hosts or end systems, and they split roughly into clients that ask and servers that answer.
The access network is your on-ramp. Fibre or cable at home, the office network, 5G from your pocket. Its only job is getting you to the first router. It is also, almost always, the slowest part of the entire journey, which is worth remembering next time you blame a website for being slow.
The core is the mesh in the middle. Routers and the links between them, and nothing else. No control room, no master server, no company that owns it.
Make a phone call and the network reserved a physical path end to end for you, for the whole call, whether you were talking or breathing.
The internet threw that out. Your data gets chopped into packets, each one stamped with where it came from and where it is going, and each one is then thrown into the network to fend for itself.
Packet three might go via Frankfurt while packet four goes via Amsterdam. They can arrive out of order. Some might not arrive at all.
This sounds worse than a reserved line, and for a single conversation it kind of is. What you get in exchange is enormous: The network is shared efficiently. Nobody is holding a lane open while they think about what to type. It routes around damage. A cut cable is a detour, not an outage. That was literally the design goal. It scales absurdly. Routers do not track your conversation. They just look at each packet and pass it on.
The reassembly, the retries, the putting-things-back-in-order, all of that happens at the two ends.
The middle stays gloriously dumb. That principle has a name, the end-to-end argument, and it is arguably why the internet could grow the way it did.
Your browser makes a request at the application layer. HTTP, or SMTP for mail, or DNS for lookups.