| Abstract | The substantial complexity of interdomain routing in theInternet comes from the need to support flexible poli-
cies while scaling to a large number of Autonomous
Systems. Despite impressive progress in characterizing
the various ills of the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP),
many problems remain unsolved, and the behavior of
the routing system is still poorly understood. This paper
argues that we must understand interdomain routing in
terms of: (1) intrinsic properties and design tradeoffs of
policy-based routing, independent of the specific routing
protocol and (2) properties that relate to artifacts in to-
day’s protocol. We pose open questions for the research
community that, if answered, should help us understand
why BGP’s many problems are so difficult to fix. Un-
derstanding the fundamental properties of interdomain
routing will help us decide how to make progress, be it
making backward-compatible modifications to BGP or
designing a radically different protocol.
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