[weavejester]

My understanding is that's more an artefact of how the Internet is physically laid out, rather than as something inherent to the TCP protocol itself. If we took all the machines on the net and put them in one huge building, we could construct a far more decentralised network architecture.

Regarding my last paragraph, both the English language and TCP/IP could be broadly said to be protocols for distributing information, but are also obviously so completely different it makes little sense to draw any parallels between them.