Do we really need a new BGP?
I have to disagree with the primary point being offered up in this post.  In my career I’ve met quite a few network engineers who don’t think sufficiently outside the box.  They typically say “this is how it’s done, this is how it works.”  The idea that we can’t come up with a better protocol than BGP to manage the interconnections of the Internet is absurd.  We don’t say “well security isn’t a programming problem, it’s a human problem, so there’s no point in making safer programming languages.”  BGP is a ridiculous system of complete trust just like many older protocols.<p>If we sat down and started designing a routing protocol to handle the advertisement of routing tables on the internet, would we come up with BGP again?  Would the new protocol potentially offer up fixes for some of the most common and obvious problems with BGP?  Then there’s potential for improvement.<p>The network industry resists and slows the horribly needed disruption in several key areas through the dogmatic defense of the status quo that we typically hear from its constituents.<p>This is why so many of us pray for SDN.  It’s the only way to wrest control of networking away from those who typically have dogmatic vendor based training rather than a “network science and theory” education that leads to innovation.