[xyzzy123]

Have thought about this a bit. I think there's a "business model" where a non-profit foundation charges a very high price (say $50 or $100/gig) and the interest on that pays for the hosting and admin. One issue is startup risk, if you don't get enough people wanting to store data "forever" it won't be sustainable.

The foundation has a remit to also do some related "good works". The idea is that the pot of money (and the interest it throws off) acts as an incentive to keep the foundation going. Eventually the cost of hosting "legacy" data should drop close to zero. You could run it as an overlay on two clouds initially to avoid capital outlay.

I think you would want librarians / archivists on the board. It wouldn't require much in the way of software, making something that could last in the long term is more of a governance problem than a technical one.