CIDR inside

In this episode of PING, APNIC Chief Scientist Geoff Huston discusses the tortuous history of The CIDR report Classless Inter-Domain Routing or CIDR, is a mechanism defined in the 90s, to replace the former model of fixed sized networks defined in RFC791 called class-A class-B or class-C (there were actually class-D and class-E but for now we can ignore them) -the "Classless" part means no longer obeying the fixed bit-pattern at the "top" of the address (in the top 3 bits) which defined which class you were in, the classes defining how many addresses were in that block: a Class-A was 17 million, a Class B was 65,000 and a Class C was 256. This worked fine for the early life of the Internet, but under the stresses of exponential growth in the 1990s a new method for allocating addresses was defined, which exploited this "classless" model and allowed people to be given sizes between 17 million and 65,000 or between 65,000 and 256. -Which in turn fixed two problems: access to addresses into the future (through the Regional Internet Registry model of justified need for addressing) and the scaling problems of the routing mechanism. Routing has roots which reach back into the 1950s when a class of methods for describing how to exchange information about paths in a system called "Bellman Ford" was defined. This mechanism came all the way into the future alongside the growth of the Internet and replaced other models of routing which had emerged in networks such as DECnet from Digital Equipment corperation, and we now know as the ubiquitous BGP4 for Border Gateway Protocol, version 4 (a very good name, for the 4th version of something which was modified from the equally well named BGP3, to add in CIDR models of prefixes. The CIDR report grew out of the need to understand who was causing the stress inside BGP, a public commons of everyones routing assertions, where if you did what was entirely rational for you to engineer better routes by announcing more of them, you made every other BGP4 speaker incur a cost. The report helped identify who was the "noisy" BGP speaker, which Autonomous Systems (AS) were responsible and how much more effective could they be, and still achieve their engineering outcome. It was an early version of "nudge" theory, using naming-and-shaming to publicly expose the damage any BGP speaker did to the commons, in a public record. Geoff has been running the CIDR report continuously for over 2 decades, following on from the work of Tony Bates and Phil Smith at Cisco. But, carried into the modern era, after so much discussion of the declining importance of BGP routing on the Internet in a world of "names based" steering for content, how relevant IS the CIDR report?