What is the essence of interconnection? At NextNY's BizDev 2.0 in November 06 there was a great deal of discussion surrounding the ease with which data from one web service can rapidly be incorporated and leveraged into another- the widgetsphere and RSS are great enablers of this- without the need for "slow" business development activity.
When this is successful it adds value. Players with market power/lawyers often see this as disruptive "theft"- see myspace/photobucket or the recent "re-peering" of some major Belgian newspapers with Google (which I think we will come to see as just a passing fad in the protectionism of content, but who knows?)
I wrote a few days ago about the similarity of the myspace/photobucket issue to the peering battles between backbone providers. "Peering" between sites on the internet
is something we take for granted in our web2.0 world, but I think we need to look at it the way backbone providers do, as an exchange of traffic (visitors instead of bits). Peering may be free, in the end, only for dominant providers. At the same time, "dominant" may turn out to not mean much over the long run, and the market power of sites like myspace may be nicely balanced by user backlash when appropriate. I'm going to call all my posts about this "TheNetwork" as I examine the interaction between peering and web2.0.