BGP: How the Internet Finds Itself

After several weeks of dissecting organizational schizophrenia and the current AI gold rush, I thought it might be time for a palate cleanser. Let’s ground ourselves in the basics.

Before we can talk about high-level abstractions, we need to understand the plumbing.

Enter BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) — the protocol that helps the Internet find itself. Remarkably more effectively than Karen on her six‐month meditation retreat in India.

(The following text (including bibliography) is a 1:1 excerpt from my upcoming book, Fuckup Almanac Vol. I: Foundations of the Digital World, which is scheduled to hit the shelves in March 2026.)

Tech Explainer: The Internet’s Honor System

The Internet isn’t one massive machine; it’s a patchwork quilt of millions of smaller networks scattered around the planet. Each of these “autonomous systems” owns a piece of cyberspace, routing traffic for its users. The tricky bit is making sure that information from your laptop in Berlin finds its way to a random server in Singapore, even though neither side has a clue where the other is. That’s where BGP, the Border Gateway Protocol, enters the picture. It’s the system where networks announce to their neighbors: “Hey, I know how to reach these addresses, send that stuff my way.” The neighbors nod, pass the message along, and forward the data to whoever seems slightly closer to the goal. No GPS, no central command — just the digital equivalent of “I’ve heard a guy down the road knows a guy who might know.”

Now, about those routes. This logic is often called hot‑potato routing, because routers try to toss traffic away as quickly as possible, not necessarily wisely. (Yes, there’s also “cold‑potato routing.” No, you don’t need to know it unless your paycheck depends on it.)

Imagine working in a postal hub in Berlin. You don’t need a map of the whole planet, just enough to guess whether a letter should go north, south, east, or west. Letter to Cologne? West. Done. Letter to Munich? South. Forward. Letter to Frankfurt? Hmm… southwest? Close enough — just hand it to whichever neighbor claims they know the way.

Note: real postal services don’t work like this. The Internet kind of does.

Here’s one more thing most people never think about: in the Internet (and any computer network, really), data isn’t sent as a single blob. It’s broken into packets, tiny parcels that travel independently and reunite at the destination. Think of it like ordering a big armchair online. The backrest might take the highway through Cologne, the seat could fly via Munich, and the armrests detour through Zurich because someone’s logistics algorithm had a moment — and yes, sometimes the people (and routers) running these sorting centers make equally ridiculous decisions. In the end, all parts (hopefully) arrive and fit together. Usually.

Of course, routers aren’t literally flipping coins; they follow a cocktail of tables, rules, and priorities, but they still rely heavily on trust. And that’s where the comedy begins.

Picture a tiny post office in Wansdorf, a real village near Berlin, population as for the time of writing this 874. One morning, its postmaster, Hans, proudly declares, “I can deliver every letter in Germany. Trust me.” And somehow, the entire country believes him. Within minutes, convoys of mail trucks reroute everything to Hans, a man whose main worries until now were counting the days to retirement and feeding the local stray cats. Predictably, disaster follows.

That’s what can happen in BGP. If one network, through typo, hubris, or sheer chaos, starts shouting “I know how to reach everywhere,” and nobody checks, the Internet takes it at face value. Suddenly, global traffic funnels through a place that was never meant to handle it. The result: outages, slowdowns, confusion, and one metaphorical Hans quietly losing his mind.

As you can see, this “honor system” approach has massive advantages in terms of scalability and decentralization, but it also creates a unique set of systemic vulnerabilities.

Relying on trust in a global network of competitors and bad actors leads to some of the most spectacular failures in IT history—several of which are detailed in the full chapters of the upcoming book.