GameSpy has posted an interview with Gabe Newell (the big cheese at Valve), regarding their just announced joint venture with Cisco Systems, PowerPlay (story). Here's an excerpt where Gabe explains their reasons for getting involved:

Although developers have certainly made a lot of progress in addressing things on their end to optimize for the current internet state-of-the-art, we ( and the people we've talked to PowerPlay about) strongly believe that the state of internet gaming is far from optimal. When we get together with other developers, we end up with a wish-list of things that have traditionally been out of our control that we would like to see addressed so that we can realistically deliver not just a solid experience, but a truly compelling experience to gamers. Our fear is that the growth of realtime interactive entertainment will hit a wall because the actual internet infrastructure isn't really capable of providing for much more growth in complexity than where things stand today.