[klodolph]

Eh… the thing about cloud storage is that it can be efficient in ways that smaller players cannot. A system like Amazon S3 can pack its hard drives to the brim with data and pay a fairly small overhead for replicas & unused drives.

If you try to decentralize the data, or keep your data yourself, you end up with something that uses more resources, has worse durability, or is worse along some other axis.

I am not so worried about centralization yet. There is still healthy competition between different cloud storage vendors. My impression is that cheap storage is used to make other cloud services more attractive—which means that Amazon’s incentives here are somewhat aligned with mine (as a customer). Personally I am much more worried about the centralization of the shopping experience.