By the time a set of engineers sat down for lunch together in Austin, the growing pains of the Internet had become desperate. Once a novelty for computer scientists, the network was bursting in size, lurching closer to a tough mathematical wall constructed into one of the most fundamental protocols of the Internet.

As the prospect of system crisis loomed, the guys started scribbling thoughts for a solution on the rear of a ketchup-stained napkin. Subsequently a second. Subsequently a third.

The three-napkins protocol is now the kludge that never died.

“Short term options often remain with us for a lengthy time. And long term options often never occur,” said Yakov Rekhter, among the engineers who devised the “three-napkins protocol.” “That is what I learned from this encounter.”

The Web can seem as elegantly designed as a race car as it immerses us in using up universes of sound and sight. But it is closer to an assemblage of kludges Frankenstein than Ferrari — that put up with since they work well enough, or at least work.

The defects they use frequently are well known and early in technological terms, living only due to an industry-wide penchant for patching around issues instead of replacing the rot.

“You are in Hackerville here on the Web. “All of the items lacks proper discipline. . . . It is paint and spackle.”

Such is the narrative of the “three-napkins protocol,” more formally called Border Gateway Protocol, or BGP.

At its most fundamental level, BGP helps routers determine the best way to send giant streams of information across the vast mesh of connections which make up the Internet. With endless quantities of potential routes — some slow and meandering, others direct and fast — BGP gives the info they should decide one to routers, even though there’s no complete map of no power charged with directing its traffic and the World Wide Web.

The development of BGP, which relies on individual networks constantly sharing information about accessible data links, helped its growth is continued by the Internet into a global network. But BGP also enables enormous swaths of information to be “hijacked” by virtually anyone with the necessary skills and accessibility.