[akarve]

Good questions. First, services like open.quiltdata.com and Amazon's Registry of Open Data cover the S3 costs for public data. So that's one incentive. Second, the cost of cloud resources are highly competitive (if not superior) to on-premise data centers (see https://twitter.com/mohapatrahemant/status/11024016152632238... I don't think it's correct to think of S3 as expensive.

There are many ways to shave S3 costs (e.g. intelligent tiering, glacier), but at some point the data become so slow to access that you can't offer a pleasant user experience around browsing, searching, and feeding pipelines.

Most importantly, the "my data, my bucket" strategy gives users control over their data. A university with their own bucket has more control over their data than they do if Google, Facebook, etc. host and monetize it.