[a3n]

It seems like if these large public datasets continue to come on line, there will need to be some sort of semi-cooperative distributed data store to make them truly "accessible." Or the data provider will need to provide an access/query API, rather than just a big tank that you can copy if you dare.

[baldfat]

Bit Torrent might actually help as a tool to help distribute these large data sets.

The big issue is that so few people actually would need to download these large dataset.

[a3n]

But possibly many more people could use access to the data while they use the apps that were made possible by the data.