Metcalfe's Law Is Wrong

by Bob Briscoe, Andrew Odlyzko, & Benjamin Tilly IEEE Spectrum, July 2006 Of all the popular ideas of the Internet boom, one of the most dangerously influential was Metcalfe's Law. Simply put, it says that the value of a communications network is proportional to the square of the number of its users. The law is said to be true for any type of communications network, whether it involves telephones, computers, or users of the World Wide Web. While the notion of "value" is inevitably somewhat vague, the idea is that a network is more valuable the more people you can call or write to or the more Web pages you can link to. Remarkably enough, though the quaint nostrums of the dot-com era are gone, Metcalfe's Law remains, adding a touch of scientific respectability to a new wave of investment that is being contemplated. That's dangerous because, as we will demonstrate, the law is wrong. Read more