In its purest form you eliminate the incentive to build better networks so you have to be careful about that.

ENGADGET: A lunchtime chat with Bill Gates at CES

Essentially, there's no incentive for the biggest social networks to have this kind of openness, because it would make it easier for their users to transfer to other networks, but Hansler says this will change.

CNN: Face to Facebook: social networks hit the streets

So if an airline attempts to gouge its customers on a particular destination, other airlines with reasonably located hubs will have a strong incentive to add such destination to their networks, frustrating the gouging airline's ability to raise prices.

CNN: Why American-US Airways deal is good

Microsoft wants people to build internet infrastructure that has the ability to feed high definition video to every screen in your house, so we want the incentive to be there for people to build up new networks and we want that network to be something that content from everyone is sort of treated in a reasonably equal way.

ENGADGET: A lunchtime chat with Bill Gates at CES

Distributed energy aims to decouple profits and consumption so that power companies have a greater incentive to invest in energy-efficiency technologies that drive distributed-energy networks.

FORBES: Magazine Article