My friend Tom and I did a talk about this at various conferences, wow, 2 years ago. The interesting thing is that we're following the same evolution as the old snail-mail network and the SMS network. Eventually we'll realize that "cloud peering" is the best solution. But there will be lots of sturm und drang before we get there.

http://assets.en.oreilly.com/1/event/31/The%20Cloud_s%20Hidd...

http://www.slideshare.net/sh1mmer/the-clouds-hidden-lockin-n...

There were four separate things needed to bring about what we think of as the modern international mail system. First you needed better infrastructure inside and between countries. You needed literally more portable objects, envelopes with stamps on them, instead of loose sheets, scrolls, wax seals, etc. You also needed standardization of the rates and address formats so one letter can travel anywhere. Last was a uniform rate, no-questions-asked promise to deliver via optimized routes, what we would now call a "peering agreement". Two ends of the agreement would treat each other as peers, and honor each others' comminucations as they would their own.

It's that kind of system we don't have, but should, in the cloud. We need better infrastructure in the form of optimized routes between clouds. We need to be able to move our virtual machines and configurations around without special help. We need to make sure we don't get locked-in by screwball APIs or data formats. Most of all, we need the various cloud and web services vendors to commit to honoring each other's traffic without clobbering us, their customers, with metered billing.