What kinds of Network Hubs are there?

At present, the more specific characteristics of scale-free networks can only be discussed in either the context of the generative mechanism used to create them, or the context of a particular real-world network thought to be scale-free. For instance, networks generated by preferential attachment typically place the high-degree vertices in the middle of the network, connecting them together to form a core, with progressively lower-degree nodes making up the regions between the core and the periphery. Many interesting results are known for this subclass of scale-free networks. For instance, the random removal of even a large fraction of vertices impacts the overall connectedness of the network very little, suggesting that such topologies could be useful for security, while targeted attacks destroys the connectedness very quickly. Other scale-free networks, which place the high-degree vertices at the periphery, do not exhibit these properties; notably, the structure of the Internet is more like this latter kind of network than the kind built by preferential attachment. Indeed, many of the results about scale-free networks have been claimed to apply to the Internet, but are disputed by Internet researchers and engineers.