I’m not getting something here. Maybe someone can help me.
I suffer from the professional disability of being a lawyer so I look at this from a perspective that maybe others do not.
Is the control centralised or decentralised? If you are paying money to a foundation somewhere that is some form of centralization. And somewhere along the chain of storage, someone is going to have to own some hardware, and they will need to be paid.
It seems like this problem is similar to the issue faced by graveyards. You pay money one time for a plot, but you want that plot protected “forever”.
Governments have created institutional solutions to handle this problem. They generally work, often through the lifetimes of multiple governments.
But I am not seeing that anyone associated with this solution has addressed that issue. It does not seem to me that the structure described can survive even changing laws and varying forms of governmental intervention.
If payments are made to a foundation, which foundation then makes payments to whoever owns the physical storage, that is a chokepoint that a sovereign government can use to exercise its sovereign authority and control (see generally https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Dotcom). If so what the author is describing can be decentralised from a technical perspective but not from the perspective of independance of government regulation or intervention.
I welcome correction if it is that I am missing something here. But I really don’t think that I am.