Please see this page for more information. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Internet_registry
(Also, the question was rhetorical - I know how that idiocy happened, and I expect that most people here do.)
(edit: and the first one of those is causing lots of unnecessary pain, not only to travellers who suddenly have to deal with a "different internet" simply because they moved their body to a different place on the planet, but also for people in multi-lingual countries, who regularly have to deal with moronic websites forcing them into some particular language version that supposedly is the "language of their location", ignoring the fact that the user not only doesn't understand the language, but specifically tells the server via appropriate headers which languages the user understands.)