The Internet is a huge cooperatively managed, distributed WAN using the worldwide telecommunications infrastructure as the vehicle to connect computer networks all over the world. From there the data travels through three routers that belong to THENet and several that belong to Sprint before finally being routed to its destination. The cloud with several servers in it represents the Internet and portrays the difficulty of defining the Internet accurately. No one entity controls the Internet, nor can anyone tell you precisely how many networks are connected to it. One way to think about the data connections that interlink all the networks participating in the Internet is like a water distribution system.
Every home has a small pipe feeding water to it.
Each neighborhood has a larger pipe to feed the whole neighborhood, and so on, up to the source of the water. If the neighborhood pipe isn't large enough, the water pressure will drop, and it becomes more difficult to do things like water the lawn, wash dishes and take showers. Each NSP is analagous to a city or state distribution system. Each ISP is analogous to a neighborhood distribution system, and each individual machine on a network is analagous to a home in that neighborhood. To some degree, this has been happening on the Internet recently.