THE comprehensive lists of addresses that the internet now uses to route information to its destination may soon be a thing of a past. That’s because the internet’s peculiar network architecture appears to be precisely tuned to allow information to find its own way around.
The internet has a “small world” architecture: in other words, it takes only a handful of steps to link any two parts, even though the network is enormous. But just because such short paths exist doesn’t mean they are easy to find.
At present, data is directed along the shortest path by the internet’s Border…
