[butlerm]

Transit providers accept traffic for delivery anywhere in the world at a tiny fraction of that figure, suggesting that the fully allocated cost per GB is not quite as high as they represent. I trust transit service is not in a venture capital funded bubble subject to collapse any day now.

The same analysis goes for storage and processing. The economic marginal cost of storing and generating data as such is quite low, probably lower than the transit cost, especially since most data stored is either soon discarded or transmitted a large number of times.

Both are among the most successful economies of scale ever invented, pretty much the opposite of what the article alleges. Measure this out as a percentage of GDP or transit/storage cost per hour of work or entertainment - it is certainly worth more than one airline industry in economic terms, advances we could hardly live without unless the plan is to roll back living standards to the 1970s or earlier.