Today I finished Mark Buchanan's Nexus. This is another book about network theory, and for much of the book, I found myself comparing it unfavorably to Albert-László Barabási's Linked. However, in Chapter 8, Buchanan describes the problem of airport congestion. The airline hub and spoke network is an example of a small-world network, that should display the winner take all property. The only problem is that's not how the network actually behaves. As certain nodes in the network attract more and more links, they become unable to handle them. The experimental results described in studying this problem show that in networks where it costs something to handle additional links, the network becomes more egalitarian (the number of links tends to be evenly distributed). One thing that this says to me, is that eventually, for some network services, the only way to handle the load is going to be via an egalitarian network. The technical success of the various P2P file sharing networks seems to be evidence of this observation.