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Telecom meltdown attacks the Internet

I'm now finally reading Barabasi’s book Links and it is turning out to be quite delightful.

Networks where the nodes – ranked by their incoming links – have power law or Zipf's Law distribution (like the distribution of wealth or the distribution of productivity) are said to be scale free.

Scale free networks are quite reliable in the face of random failures since so much of their wealth is concentrated into the hubs and the random chance of hitting one of those is small; but they are also extremely easy to attack since the hubs stand out.

As a fine example of the risks of concentration of wealth consider the contingency plans that companies are attempt to make should WorldCom have to shut down portions of it’s networks. The situation with the Internet in Europe is particularly messy at this point.

"Michael Powell, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, said this week that the industry was in a state of "utter crisis" and that he was bracing for more bad news. ... The prospect of a telecommunications collapse now ranks as the most likely disaster to assail Corporate America" from the contengency planning article in CNET News