In A Brief History of the Internet it was revealed that the Internet was based on the idea that there would be multiple independent networks of rather arbitrary design. The Internet as we now know it embodies a key underlying technical idea, namely that of open architecture networking. In this approach, the choice of any individual network technology was not dictated by a particular network architecture but rather could be selected freely by a provider and made to interwork with the other networks through a meta-level "Internetworking Architecture".  

With the cloud we are in the same situation today, just a layer or two higher up the stack. We have independent clouds that we would like to connect and work seamlessly together, preferably with the ease at which we currently connect nodes to a network and networks to the Internet. This technology seems to be called the Intercloud: an interconnected global "cloud of clouds" as apposed to the Internet which is a "network of networks."

Vinton Cerf, person most often called the father of the Internet, says in Cloud Computing and the Internet that we are ripe for an Intercloud in the same way we were once ripe for the Internet: