Scaling in the space-time of the Internet

The Internet on the router level, is a complex network embedded in a geographical space. We provide experimental evidences suggesting that the average travel time for a message, with fixed length, increases roughly as the square root of the geographical distance. To understand this scaling law and other measurable topological properties of the Internet as a graph, we introduce and study a simple network model. The model is based on a few realistic socio-economic facts/assumptions and qualitatively reproduces the experimentally observed stylized facts.