I do think that in an alternate reality, where we would have anticipated that BGP abuse and +1M prefixes we would have landed somewhere entirely different than where we are today. And in that
Thinking bit more this. If we had ended up in solution something like this, which enforces joint AS:prefix relation. Our lookup engines likely would be very different, because we could have gotten away with some sort of inter domain MPLS, with 'AS labels', doing exact match AS lookups, instead of LPM IP while in transit and LPM only in edges. In this future, it likely would look like not worthwhile to develop fast LPM lookup engines with deep FIBs, and instead inside-ASN we'd assign egress-port labels to work with the HW we would have developed. So possibly HW based LPM simply wouldn't exist. Not saying that would be desirable at all, but it seems likely it would have had profound impact on how we decide to build forwarding. -- ++ytti