Routing Insecurity (Re: BGP in the Washington Post)

Mon Jun 1 15:17:39 UTC 2015

On 1/Jun/15 17:00, Jared Mauch wrote:
> This can have catastrophic effects if one does that with your sewers,
> septic fields, etc but we accept it in the BGP and routing universe
> for some reason.

Because our industry (for better or worse) is not as regulated as other
"life-concerning" things in the world such as health, aviation,
education, construction, finance, electricity, e.t.c., are, it is up to
us to make sure we do the right thing. But if there is no "official" or
"standard" metric against which we can hold one another accountable, we
are all bound to do our own things, as you say, that are enough to make
it work and forget about it.

As the saying goes, "You can't blame a monkey for botching a brain surgery".

Our lack of regulation means we can quickly scramble up a global routing
protocol on three napkins and get it into production. This is a good thing.

The question now is - how important is this Internetnetwork to us that
we are willing to accept a moderate to significant amount of
inconvenience in order to improve its long term utility the same way we
expect the sewer companies to do a decent job keeping the filth out of
sight?

Mark.