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I seem to remember a study (may have been done by CAIDA) in which it was theorized that the internet is only 19 links "wide".

This was meant to mean that any site can be reached through following 19 links or less from any other site. I would guess that this would not apply to linkless pages, but otherwise wouldn't every site containing any kind of valid link link to DeCSS through "a series of links"?

Just my two cents...

--dgc

If you check out the the map at CAIDA you will notice that the USA appears to be very dense with backbones and this make for a lot redundency. The world could survive without the USA, but it would effect the flow of the traffic as there aren't enough large bandwidth pipes connecting Europe-Asia, Asia-South America directly, most traversing the USA.

I reckon in this century the creation of large traffic pipes to route around the USA would actually help relieve some of the burden currrently carried by the USA internet infrastructure and probably help traffic generally for non-USA data on the internet.

For example, in their paper Measurements of Internet topology in the Asia-Pacific Region, they focus part of their study on which countries provide IP transit for other countries. In other words, they want to know how often certain countries carry traffic that is neither sourced nor destined for that country. They conclude, in part (see Sections 4 and 5):

U.S. networks do seem to dominate global Internet topology -- they provide transit for 71.4% of the total skitter paths that neither originate nor end in the U.S. U.S. networks appear to be especially significant for other countries in the Americas: all traffic to Mexico and 97.8% of traffic to Peru and Chile (SWA) crosses the U.S. on its way. Our sample also shows a large transit role played by U.S. networks for traffic to China-Hong Kong (90.3%), Taiwan (83.5%) and Oceania (77.8% of traffic to Australia and 79.6 of traffic to New Zealand).

[...]

The U.S. is the major Internet transit intermediary for the rest of the world: 71% of traces that neither start nor end in the U.S. still pass through it. In most connections between different countries, the U.S. is the only third party country that also appears in the path.

For example, in their paper Measurements of Internet topology in the Asia-Pacific Region, they focus part of their study on which countries provide IP transit for other countries. In other words, they want to know how often certain countries carry traffic that is neither sourced nor destined for that country. They conclude, in part (see Sections 4 and 5):

U.S. networks do seem to dominate global Internet topology -- they provide transit for 71.4% of the total skitter paths that neither originate nor end in the U.S. U.S. networks appear to be especially significant for other countries in the Americas: all traffic to Mexico and 97.8% of traffic to Peru and Chile (SWA) crosses the U.S. on its way. Our sample also shows a large transit role played by U.S. networks for traffic to China-Hong Kong (90.3%), Taiwan (83.5%) and Oceania (77.8% of traffic to Australia and 79.6 of traffic to New Zealand).

[...]

The U.S. is the major Internet transit intermediary for the rest of the world: 71% of traces that neither start nor end in the U.S. still pass through it. In most connections between different countries, the U.S. is the only third party country that also appears in the path.

In the "new research" portion of last year's SIGCOMM, there was a talk called "Let Fireflies Light Your Way". They talked about building a distributed braking system for trains (and proving its convergence to a 'correct' solution, grin) and mapping similar ideas to flow control and routing for faster convergence to stable behavior. Pretty cool stuff, and the talk is available via the mbone - go here and look at session 5, talk "5-1,2-ali,barford".

Try taking a look a CAIDA

One of the interesting applications they have at caida is the graphical traceroute that plots the physical location of the hop on a map. www.caida.org/Tools/GTrace

Mean hop distance is relatively easy to measure, as IP addresses are nicely arranged. Measuring clicks takes a bit more work, I feel. A somewhat cryptic document by another guy at caida.org puts the average hop at 14-15. A great link with more info is the
Internet Distance Maps Project.

For more pretty pictures, check out the Internet Mapping Project.

The Source code for that mandelbrot set is available at Caida. My friend has been working on the project for quite some time, ever since graduating at UCSD. Most of the work is done by him in the San Diego Super Computer Center. Take a look at the software, it's java and Brad put a lot of cross platform testing into it. So it should run fine everywhere. (Java claim). It has a lot of really nice features to it.
Joseph Elwell.

The Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) is also doing interesting Internet data capture, analysis, and mapping.

but still pretty neat is Mapnet that shows the major backbones, peering stuff and pipe sizes.