And this has been their defense all along. It serves the status quo to imply that transitions must be difficult. IPv6 being the most obvious example today. Of course as DJB pointed out, backwards compatible IPv6 would have already rolled out by now, at the cost of a single /64. Dual stack was literally the most difficult way to accomplish IPv6.
Now let’s look at the BGP situation. As long as the outcome is the same (same routing tables result in nominal situations), any two ISPs could choose to use a different protocol for their interconnection. Same thing that has happened with a lot of supplemental networking protocols.
There are BGP alternatives on deck. What we don’t need is high profile network engineers speaking out against them and in favor of the status quo. The truth is, networking is the one part of the industry that isn’t improving at the same pace as the rest. And all the improvements that are happening seem to be related to single links and switching, whereas the defense of networking dogma is related to routing. According to the holy bible of networking, switching is easy, routing is hard. Routers must be memory restricted with small memory footprints to artificially create SKUs. Routers must operate on multi-minute timers rather than seconds. Building routing tables is an insanely intense and time consuming process. Blah blah blah.
The reality is, almost all of these problems are contrived to maintain the status quo and so network vendors can ignore the pace of hardware and instead set SKUs at resource levels that force you to use the “appropriate” piece of hardware for the appropriate task.
Another smell that should make this obvious to everyone is that almost every major company has had high level engineers make some statement of how network companies are ripping you off, and explaining how they bought white box network solutions that route layer 3 at wire speed, converge rapidly, and have tons of memory. Not to mention the vast improvement something like well designed SDN can provide.
The network companies rely on the fact that most companies don’t have the labor or expertise to use white label solutions. But that doesn’t disprove the point. That proves the point that the state of hardware is “super cheap components provide all the switching and routing performance and memory needed for almost 99% of networking purposes.” Companies like Cisco are playing the Intel +25Mhz game. Supposedly disrupting companies do so at an awfully measured pace. And the network staff generally will open up to off brand switches but start to shy away at routing, especially edge routing.
As an industry, networking needs to be disrupted and it needs a severe model change. People involved in networking need to get on board, and those who don’t and insist on fighting for the status quo need to be left behind.