A look at MANRS, a group of ~600 participants including Google, which aims to add safeguards to the Border Gateway Protocol, improving internet routing security
This piece lands at the moment that momentum becomes visible — roughly 600 participants now, with Google's weight behind adding safeguards to BGP. The pressure on laggards is already externalized: Cloudflare's Is BGP Safe Yet checker lets anyone test whether their ISP filters bad routes.
First-order effects
ISPs not yet implementing MANRS safeguards face a widening reputational gap, now measurable through both the Observatory tool and Cloudflare's public checker.
Google's participation gives the ~600-member group direct leverage over one of the largest sources of global traffic, raising the cost of non-compliance for transit providers.
Second-order effects
Cloud providers and CDNs that joined MANRS can start conditioning peering and transit relationships on demonstrated filtering, turning routing security from a goodwill pledge into a commercial requirement.
ISPs that fail the public checks risk customer and enterprise scrutiny, pushing routing-security work into procurement conversations rather than engineering back channels.
Third-order effects
If adoption keeps compounding, BGP security shifts from voluntary initiative toward de facto infrastructure requirement — a trajectory the White House's later roadmap for shoring up BGP confirms by moving the issue into policy territory.
The end state is an internet where unfiltered route announcements are treated like unpatched software: an operational liability rather than a default.
The trend: Internet routing is moving from a trust-based protocol patched by voluntary coalitions toward verifiable, publicly graded security baselines enforced by the largest traffic holders and, increasingly, governments.
“Google and Facebook seemed glitchy or inaccessible for people worldwide for more than an hour... It was the latest mishap to stem from design weaknesses in the “Border Gateway Protocol,” the internet's foundational, universal routing system” https://twitter.com/...
“Google & Cloudflare are increasingly motivated to back this change for the overall health of the internet, but also because BGP route leaks that result in outages reflect poorly on them regardless of where the issue actually originates.” Great reporting as usual by @lilyhnewman …
Every few yrs there are urgent calls to fix BGP - the border gateway protocol w/ security issues that allow nefarious actors to reroute internet traffic to routers they control to copy/read/alter data - and each time little happens. Looks like this time could be different. https:…
I'm delighted to see this, but from my perspective we really need BGPSEC. RPKI is important—and in fact it's a prerequisite for BGPSEC—but the world has already seen malicious BGP hijacks that would work even with universal deployment of RPKI. https://twitter.com/...
Great to see google/CDNs getting more involved in the @RoutingMANRS initiative and more folks doing RPKI. not a complete fix to BGP issues but a huge step forward. https://twitter.com/...
Mishaps in the internet's universal routing system can be hugely disruptive, causing platforms like Google and Facebook to become glitchy or inaccessible. Now a well-backed coalition is turning a corner in its fight to make the internet more secure. https://www.wired.com/...