At 7:40 AM 9/11/95, Hans-Werner Braun wrote:

Well, while Sean's wording at times is, ahem, suboptimal, he is referring to a real problem in the Internet System, and in fact one that the North American Network Operators Group should take responsibility for, at least for the North American part. The problem is what others believe is a strength: an anarchic system of many autonomous service providers with little or no service model/metrics (neither for the local nor for the system level), and no well defined rules of conduct for interoperation and problem resolution.

H-W; There was once, and still technically may be, the "User Connectivity Problems" (UCP) working group in the IETF Ops area that began a process for coordination among the then regional NSFnet network's NOCs back in '90 or so. Much of the work accomplished by UCP on developing process for NOC-to-NOC coordination is still valid, but the players have increased in number and are re-inventing this wheel. So, the Internet anarchy has been under attack for some time now. If there is any interest (I know, hacking the configs is #1, formal coordination and documentation are a distant #2) I'll go look up some of the documents. --Kent