It should also be noted that the CAIDA study only examined the core
"giant cluster" of the Internet. In other words they only looked at the
most interconnected part of the Internet not the whole Internet. While
you could argue only the core matters, the methodological approach gives
you much different results. You are ignoring the places that were
disconnected or balkanized in other studies (Albert et al 2000, Cohen et
al 2002...etc.) CAIDA are the data gurus, so I'm sure there is good
justification for this, it is just not outline in their paper -
http://www.caida.org/analysis/topology/resilience/