All good points! I should have mentioned this more explicitly but you could take the buying-raw-storage model and use it to do anything S3 does, I think. Eg yo

All good points! I should have mentioned this more explicitly but you could take the buying-raw-storage model and use it to do anything S3 does, I think. Eg you could have three independent whole copies, or one whole copy and 1.5 copies distributed widely. The only thing I can think of that Amazon could do that you couldn't do, if the raw storage providers are untrusted, is serve the data with no addition hops, since the data would be encrypted.