Since data transmission on the internet conforms to geography, perhaps the best indicator of distance between two nodes (in terms of transportation of data) could be their geographical location. Routing of data would then be as simple as forwarding the data to any node that is closer in distance to location, geographically, and continuing to do so until reaching the location. The addressing could be fractal with an infinite address space, the Earth divided into a lattice and each unit in the lattice divided into a lattice, and each unit of each unit of each lattice divided into a lattice, and so on.
