The stress on today’s inter-domain routing system is constantly and sharply increasing. The mere size of the Internet, operational practices and a number of limitations of the routing protocol itself worsen the scaling behavior of this funda- mental service at an alarming rate. This paper introduces 2SIDR, a two step inter-domain routing approach that aims at significantly reducing the state requirements of routers while minimizing the incurred path stretch penalty. This fundamental trade-off has already been analyzed on a graph theoretical basis in the domain of compact routing. In contrast to those theoretical approaches, 2SIDR aims at what we call practical compactness. It deliberately gives up mathematical bounds while only relying on data that is available in practice and adhering to existing business relationships between operators in the Internet.