The Internet is becoming an immense organism of composite, highly distributed, pervasive, communication intensive services. For such a system to operate effectively, a sensible dialogue between users, services and the network components must proceed constantly based on mutual observation, self-observation, and adaptive and distributed feedback control. We review issues such as network "situational awareness", self-organisation, and structure, and relate these concepts to research on autonomic communication systems. We discuss how this vision can benefit from techniques that have been experimented in the cognitive packet network (CPN) test-bed at Imperial College, which dynamically routes traffic using on-line monitoring, based on users' QoS needs and the network's objectives.