Are we to imagine a future where consumers cannot purchase storage media?
Yes that's coming. Many countries are starting to put tariffs on hard drives. And in my country, Canada, they also slow down your internet when downloading large files and it costs $1.5 per gigabyte to exceed my 85GB/mo limit. I might as well redirect my downloads to an online service and keep all my data online until I need.
My bet is within 3 years we'll reach the threshold where it might as well be worth it to store files online rather download them and store them permanently on hard drives on a computer running constantly in your home.
I feel like I'm missing something terribly obvious, but...
How does "it is getting harder and slower to move large files over the net" lead to the conclusion "therefore we should store all our large files on the net and retrieve them whenever we want, rather than keep them on local media with negligible latency and huge storage space"?
The problem with this is generally speaking, if you take possession of a file, either locally, or on a remote filesystem. You are likely to use it, and also likely to use it shortly after taking possession. Be it Music, Photos, Documents, or a Movie, the data that normal people take possession of needs to be downloaded and viewed to be useful.
If at this point, there is no local storage, and it's stored in the cloud, you need to pay the bandwidth price every time you wish to view it, rather just on taking possession.
This particular example, about Canada increasing bandwidth charges, actually works against your argument.
Sure, some data won't need to make it to the client, but that's mostly only true if your a scientist, or otherwise run computation on data, but that's hardly the case for the general person.
Solution: VPS outside Canada to do your downloads from.
But what you describe is a networking problem (transit costs of your ISP passed on to you). Not a storage problem.
A "cloud storage" provider is just going to keep the data you store in a datacenter near to you anyway, not halfway around the world. But it's not like keeping your physical stuff with a storage company. You can easily store the data yourself with many more advantages. The marketing teams for "cloud storage" services will no doubt try to convince people otherwise.
True, but he's admitting he doesn't access ("use") the data in the same month he downloads it. So downloading from his VPS IP address to the VPS's secondary storage, outside Canada, won't count toward his monthly Canada ISP's cap. It's only when he decides to download data from the VPS's secondary storage to his "local system" he'll begin using his monthly allowance.
My bet is within 3 years we'll reach the threshold where it might as well be worth it to store files online rather download them and store them permanently on hard drives on a computer running constantly in your home.