You are reading this article because of a protocol you have never heard of. Every packet of data that crosses the internet, every email, every video call, every transaction, is routed by BGP.
Border Gateway Protocol. Co-designed by a man named Yakov Rekhter. You almost certainly do not know his name.
What BGP does
The internet is not one network. It is 70,000+ separate networks (called autonomous systems) that need to agree on how to reach each other. BGP is the protocol that makes that agreement possible.
When you load a webpage, your request might cross 5, 10, 20 different networks to reach the server. BGP is how each network along the path knows where to send your packets next. It is the routing language of the entire internet.
Rekhter co-authored RFC 1105 in 1989, the original BGP specification. He continued refining it through BGP-4 (RFC 4271), which is still the version running today.
Why you should care
When BGP has problems, entire countries go offline. Pakistan accidentally hijacked YouTube’s BGP routes in 2008 and took YouTube down worldwide for two hours. A BGP leak in 2019 caused large portions of European internet traffic to route through China Telecom for over two hours.
These incidents happen because BGP was designed in an era of trust. The protocol has no built-in authentication. Any network can announce that it owns any address space, and its neighbors will believe it. The fact that the internet works at all is a testament to BGP’s design. The fact that it sometimes fails spectacularly is a reminder that trust-based systems are fragile at scale.
The recognition gap
People know TCP/IP. They know HTTP. They might know DNS. Almost nobody outside of networking knows BGP, despite it being arguably the most critical protocol for global internet connectivity.
Yakov Rekhter worked at IBM, Cisco, and Juniper Networks. He quietly retired. The protocol he designed carries every bit of data you will send or receive today.
That gap between impact and recognition is what makes someone an unsung hero. Rekhter designed the glue that holds the internet together. The internet forgot to thank him.
[Draft: Awaiting Carlos’s twist]