[Din] Preferential attachment and centralization tendencies

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There are those network evolution models by Barabasi et al that go like this:

  *   The cheaper it is to connect your node directly to a desired node, the more centralized a network will be
  *   The more  costly direct connections are, the less centralized a network is

Eg. road network: building a direct road from my home to my place of work would be prohibitively expensive.
I just connect to the nearest road. So the road network is pretty decentral, nodes in the graph (crossing) has a low grade.

With commercial plane traffic, adding direct connections is cheaper than with roads but only up to a point. Even big airports can only
handle a limited number of slots. So we are seeing a network with a fair number of big hubs / nodes with a degree of a couple of hundred
direct destinations.

With the web, having a direct connection (on layer 3+) is only limited by the server capacity.
And we see only a handful of big nodes with a degree in the millions (as seen from the outside).

The best way to decentralize the Internet might be to deteriorate the connectivity. When connectivity cost made you choose between
cheap local calls and expensive long distance calls, decentral architectures like the Usenet emerged.

With cheap global connectivity, the decentral service will always have to compete in terms of speed, ease of use, and function with
centralized services.

Wolfgang Beck