You _need_ a license to drive a car, fly a plane etc. but until now you dont need to show that youre skilled enough to run a border router. Good idea? I dont think so.
My point was that even with a license, accidents still occur.
Even with a licence and testing, airline crashes still occur, commercial airline pilots still arrive at work drunk or die of heart-attacks behind the wheel of the airplane. But, due to a lot of effort in making better educational material available for pilots, including better flight simulators and better simulator scenarios, flying is a lot safer than it was in 1958. Not to mention the great effort that is put into post-mortem studies of airline crashes, the open sharing of information around the world, and the steady incremental improvement of best-practices and educational materials. The Internet operations "profession" could do all of that without any need for laws, licenses, inspections, or whatever. In fact, if you look around you, the Internet ops profession actually *DOES* do a lot of the same stuff that the airline industry does and things ARE getting better when you measure the impact per user or per connected device. The net is a lot bigger than it was 10 years ago, and far fewer incidents happen that have wide impact. In fact, it is not even clear that this YouTube incident counts as having wide impact. How many people were impacted by the YouTube outage compared to the Asian Tsunami/landslide of 2005? You don't need a Rogers Commission (Challenger disaster) or a 9-11 Commission set up by the President to solve these problems. For all the moaning and complaining that hit this list and the blogosphere, lots of people actually are studying the root cause of this disaster and taking action to mitigate such events in the future. It should be no surprise that the most important such mitigation events are not related to installing more BGP filters, but in making sure that outages/anomalies are promptly detected and promptly escalated to the RIGHT people in the operations team who can fix or mitigate them.
I am not against training personnel, but your solution doesn't resolve either of the above for the most part.
Training is a form of education, and education is a necessary prelude to action. You would be a fool to just accept someone's advice from this list and run out to implement it RIGHT NOW. Better to study it, try it in the lab. Figure out what it does, why it does it. Think about how to monitor it and manage it. Write up a business case to see if you really can justify this action to management. Then document it and do it when everybody understands the problem and the solution. Alex wrote such a brilliant message summarizing the discussion to date that I'm thinking we should reshape the mailing list committee into a kind NTSB http://www.ntsb.gov/ for the Internet that would solicit comments, compile incident reports and produce best practice documents. That kind of thing might be valuable enough that somebody would pay NANOG to do it. --Michael Dillon