I realise that my mental models for understanding the internet and having an overview of how it all works is informed by big tech people, vc's, entrepreneurs or thinkbois on YouTube.

This impacted my understanding of Bitcoin as well.

I have to spend a lot of time on this I feel like. Will probably take a decade I think, and that's okay.

The goal is to understand how local governments can leverage the existing open protocols of the internet to attain a certain degree of autonomy.

All the layers, standards bodies like ietf, w3c, iana and icann, coordination between ISP's , autonomous networks, etc. There's quite a lot that make up the internet as we know it, that I have very little understanding about.