It seems like the cost for perpetual storage would end up about 5x the current annual cost. See this post for the data and calculations. Historically every 10 years there’s about a 10x reduction in cloud storage cost. Storage costs seem to be convergent, not divergent.
On a bit more of a social angle to free GET, I’m currently reading The Gifts Of Athena [2004] and there are some pretty relevant quotes
Progress in exploiting the existing stock of knowledge will depend first and foremost on the efficiency and cost of access to knowledge.
When the access costs become very high, it could be said in the limit that social knowledge has disappeared
If access costs are low, the likelihood of losing an existing “piece” of knowledge is small.
Access costs thus determine how likely it is that new discoveries and knowledge will be added [to the overall knowledge base] because the lower access costs are, the more knowledge will be cumulative.
Access costs, however, depend not just on technological variables. They also depend on the culture of knowledge: if those who possess it regard it as a source of wealth, power, or privilege, they will tend to guard it more jealously.
Nature poses certain challenges and constraints that matter to the human material condition, and overcoming these constraints is what technology is all about.
To be sure, engineering knowledge during the age of the baroque had achieved some remarkable successes, and besides Leonardo a number of brilliant engineers and inventors are known to have proposed precocious devices: one thinks of Cornelis Drebbel, Simon Stevin, Giambattista Delia Porta, Robert Hooke, Blaise Pascal, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, among many others. Yet obtaining access to their knowledge remained very difficult for subsequent rank-and-file engineers and mechanics, because it was often presented to a selected audience or never published. The Enlightenment began a process that dramatically lowered these access costs.
The significance of the information revolution is not that we can read on a screen things that we previously read in the newspaper or looked up in the library, but that marginal access costs to codified knowledge of every kind have declined dramatically. The hugely improved communications, the decline in storage and access costs to knowledge, may turn out to be a pivotal event.
Another relevant source is the safenetwork.tech fundamentals, free access is one of the fundamental values of the network.
Allow anyone to have unrestricted access to public data: all of humanity’s information, available to all of humanity.
Let anyone browse content anonymously and free of charge
It is crucial that the new decentralised web is without barriers. One of the most important foundations for a global, collaborative platform is that anyone can access public content for free at any time without the need to create an account.
There have been many discussions about how it’s ‘not economically feasible’ to have free GET. foreverjoyful and the ‘sustainability concerns’ topic in particular comes to mind.
The thing that especially provokes me on this point is projects like Filecoin can’t give a simple link to ‘try out filecoin’ because to try it out you need the coin, so there’s a huge amount of friction compared to clicking a link or opening an exe. I’ve never seen a filecoin link in the wild, but I’ve definitely seen ipfs links and onion links. Free GET is essential for adoption. Economics is about creating and delivering value, it’s not just about having a token that enables everything to be precisely accounted for.
I agree bandwidth isn’t free. Egress costs for cloud providers are currently the major bottleneck for most services. I was recently chatting with a guy who works on genetic sequencing and once we both realized we were ‘computer people’ the first thing he bought up was cloud egress costs. It’s a real and legitimate problem.
Zooming way way way out and thinking would there possibly be an arrangement of humans and atoms that reduces information transfer costs so low that it’s free, I’d say yes, it’s absolutely possible we could lay enough fibre and have enough satellites and do enough maintenance and do enough lawyering that we can deliver information to everyone for free.
This is an interesting angle on pay for GET.
I guess one way is to have all GET include a fee but some requests set the value to 0.
Or another way is some requests have no fee included, and some do.
Either way it seems like adding fee for GET makes quite a bit of extra work for nodes, either extra bandwidth to include a 0 fee, or extra computation to filter fee vs no fee.
The simplicity of no fee for the most popular and basic action seems pretty nice to me. I’m not really convinced that pay for GET is a good option.