Gutenberg-Richter law for Internetquakes

The temporal behavior of the Internet is studied by performing Ping experiments. Sudden drastic changes in the Internet time series of round-trip times of the Ping signals (i.e., congestion of the network) are catastrophic and can be identified as "Internetquakes". Magnitude of the Internetquakes is defined and the Gutenberg-Richter law is found to hold for the cumulative frequency of the Internetquakes and magnitude. Therefore, earthquakes, financial markets and the Internet share a common scale free nature in their temporal behaviors. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.