Last updated · reviewed for accuracy
BGP in plain English
Between organisations, routing is politics, and BGP is its language. Roughly 75,000 autonomous systems announce “I can reach these prefixes” to their neighbours, who repeat it onwards with their own name appended. No shortest path, no central map, just policy, trust, and route filtering.
This is the lesson that makes internet outage news readable. Pair it with the ASN Lookup tool to meet the networks by name.