A flexible mechanism for routers to select the egress point for each destination prefix, herein referred to as tunable inter-domain egress (TIE) selection, comprises the step of ranking possible points of egress according to a metric, allowing network administrators to satisfy diverse goals, such as traffic engineering and robustness to equipment failures. A weighting function is discussed whereby known hot potato routing can be weighted against a fixed ranking scheme. TIE has been applied to data of two different autonomous systems posing different problems solved using integer-programming and multi-commodity flow techniques, respectively, to tune the TIE according to the weighting function to satisfy network-wide objectives. Experiments with traffic, topology and routing data from two different backbone networks demonstrate that TIE is both simple (for the routers) and expressive (for the network administrators) and can be practically applied in traffic engineering.