This document discusses ways to motivate federation between organizations that provide cloud computing services. It argues that federation makes the most sense currently for researchers, as they have limited resources but could aggregate what they have. Federation may also make sense for governments and enterprise users to reduce risks. However, enterprise cloud providers have little incentive today to federate as they have sufficient scale and coverage already. The document raises questions about how to shape research efforts to make them relevant to other domains and compares the challenges of federation today to those in the early 1980s when the Internet began growing.