Hey man great post!

Most of all since it shows your vast knowledge on this so I got encouraged to ask you this question I have:

How does the lightning nodes routing payment technology works? meaning, I heard a lot that the payment channels are like a smart contract between 2 bitcoin private keys, so if that's the case what's underneath the technology of the nodes that enables payment to go through them to find the wallet that is receiving the payment?

It's a 2 part question since what I'm trying to find out is if big companies will be able to develop a bandwidth shaping technology as they have done so in the case of ISP with the internet to limit the bandwidth of the lightning network nodes and hence hijack bitcoin and manipulate it as ISP are doing with the internet ?