Review of The Laws of the Web by Bernardo A. Huberman

The Laws of the Web by renowned researcher Bernardo A. Huberman is a systematic attempt to explain the predominant patterns of the "gigantic informational ecosystem" we call the Internet. He begins by describing the revolutions in communications and computational power which have made possible the creation of this network and the immense connectivity that it implies for people all over the world. Data in the form of digital bits, for example, has now replaced voice as the main consumer of bandwidth. He then moves on to its development as an economic force.

Historically speaking, we have moved from heat (The Industrial Revolution) to electricity and then on to electronics. We have now reached an age where wealth in general and the wealth of information in particular can shift its location across the world, seemingly at will. He mentions the fact that, as with other great economic shifts, it is the young who seem more willing to engage in this new economy, both because of its high risk and also because of a new cultural phenomenon that, for example, confers high status to membership in a start-up. The young value the sense of belonging to the next transformational wave. He also expects that new economic laws have yet to appear for an economy based on bits rather than mass, laws that will someday better describe this "massless" information economy. If, for example, information which used to be scarce and thus valuable is now pervasive, easily reproducible and obtainable through a couple of clicks in a Web browser, "almost nothing can be charged for it." The scarce and therefore expensive resource, however, is now the knowledge required to process that information.

The "physical" consistency of the Internet is dealt with in greater detail. The Internet is a nonlinear system. Its "behavior" cannot be explained by just adding up all the partial actions or its constituent parts. This behavior is punctuated by sudden spikes of congestion, sometimes called Internet "storms", which quickly subside as slowdowns become intolerable. What is surprising about these Internet storms is that they imply a large degree of coordination among surfers who are not even aware of the existence of each other. There seems to be some kind of universal mechanism out there that not only underlies the growth of the Web but also determines the distribution of its characteristics. A few sites consist of millions of pages, but millions of sites only contain a handful of pages. And that, in essence, explains the defining characteristic of the Web: the existence of hubs.

The size of the Web doubles now every few months and seems at first to reflect the idiosyncratic fashion with which the individual "owners of pages" relate to other information. But the top 1 percent of sites captures more than half the total volume. The top 5 percent accounts for almost 60 percent of all visitor traffic. And this seems to follow this mysterious universal power law that also neatly matches the distribution of pages per site or links per page. Huberman than explores that surprising and interesting social phenomenon sometimes called "six degrees of separation". It holds that between any two people on this planet there is a path of no more than six acquaintances linking one person to the other. He demonstrates that in the Web, through the existence of hubs, this is indeed the case. This is made possible by the high degree of clustering that the Internet provides. And this clustering is, not surprisingly, consumer driven. As we all know, when confused by similar offerings, a customer usually relies on the value of a brand name in order to choose. "Brands" like Google or eBay eventually became synonymous with a level of quality and reliability and are, not surprisingly, two of the larges hubs in existence. One interesting point made here is that unlike the traditional consumer, the "price" a potential buyer is willing to pay is more likely to be the time (the clicks) he is willing to spend at a site. His visit is an implicit recommendation to the site in question.

The Laws of the Web is a very thought provoking, if not sometimes overly technical book that sheds light on the mechanisms that lie hidden behind the Web. It is a thoroughly enjoyable read for the researcher, as well as for the researcher in all of us.