DNS ROOT understanding

Thu Sep 30 07:06:18 UTC 2004

On Tue, Sep 28, 2004 at 11:53:28AM +0200,
 Lars-Johan Liman <liman at autonomica.se> wrote 
 a message of 36 lines which said:

> The root servers are *CLOSELY* monitored by a large group already,
> the operators themselves obviously included.

Pure curiosity from me: who is this "large group"? Is it formally
incorporated / chartered / etc? Or is it just an informal group of
friends? Do they publish things like statistics of response times?