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As all Internet users, I've visited web sites which appear to know in which country and city I'm located. I understand that these web sites typically look up my IP address in a database which maps IP address to country / city which works fairly well. I've also seen companies selling this type of database.
How is this database, which maps an IP address to a country / city, created in the first place?
Is there a central database somewhere where each ISP registers the link between IP address and country/city? Or does the companies selling geolocation databases contact different ISP's and purchase the mapping information from them? Or is there some organization 'above' ISP's who keeps track of this?
The content of a link might change (or even die completely). Please add information to your answer, eg by quoting the relevant parts of the article. – Baarn – 2012-07-06T21:22:45.210