Getting closer to agreement with Ted.

Even more on UDDI.  UDDI provides the opportunity for metadata to describe the services, and the likely response here will be that "This will be one of the constraints you can establish when querying UPS, FedEx and DeutschePost for the service", but that presumes that I don't have some kind of partner-based relationship with one or the other; in short, it doesn't reflect the larger business concern that I want to cut deals with companies to give them exclusive access to my business in exchange for price breaks, priority service, and whatnot.  [The Mountain of Worthless Information]

That's just why I distinguish between global and local registries. You'll only dispatch from you local UDDI registry. That will only have services registered that you trust and that you have an estalished relationship (and SLA) with. The power is that you can add and remove services from there without having to change anything in your code and it is a consistent place and a consistent model to do so for any service. The global UDDI registries are yellow pages, the local UDDI registry (yours) is a Rolodex(tm).