"People use banks because banks operates on certain standards and laws, which enables easier movement of money from one bank to another for bank customers. Cloud vendors should also frame certain laws and standards, that will enable moving of data from one cloud vendor to another in future."<p>I really like this idea, but how does one enforce/regulate those kinds of standards? I feel like google is putting forth a pretty good effort with their protocol based wave, but they have an amazing amount of clout to throw around and are increasingly being accused of being monopolists because of it. A lot of developers could choose to avoid any standard Google puts forward, because anything Google does is <i>obviously</i> only done to promote their own self-interest.<p>As it gets easier and cheaper to set up cloud servers, I can only foresee a further splintering of existing protocols. If I were to set up my own cloud server, chances are I would build some kind of personalized REST based platform because that's what I know and am comfortable with. It would serve my purposes, but it may not serve my competetion's cloud server. Who would build their own API. How does this ever coalesce into one standardized protocol?