Johnathan, here is a thought for a solution:

When someone wishes to publish "in perpetuity" they upload their content (to something like filecoin) and they pay an amount of money equal to four times the expected cost of maintaining that data for 4 years.

Because of the compounding of money, by the time the HW is needed to be replaced, the ROI on the extra money has grown, so the remaining money can pay for the upgrades. As long as the market gives us a handful of percents of return above inflation, we can forever pay for hardware to house this data.

Second we charge for retrieval of rarer materials. Anything that is accessed many times over is free, but once a user is accessing materials years old, they start needing to pay a nominal fee to access the materials.

They are happy to do this, since w/o this "forever" service it would have been hard or impossible to get this info. Still this does not need to happen very often at all in order to dramatically lower the cost of submitting info... at least info from authors that are known to be of future interest.

My idea is a self-funding service embedded within the existing internet where for just a couple of bucks one can publish forever materials, or one can even pay to ensure that some linked material you did not author will remain forever accessible. Then as others also link to the same materials, your payment can be reduced quickly towards near zero for popular materials.

Seems such an approach is scalable, and solves your issue... at least as long as markets can return a good postive value... and/or as long as people continue to pay to gain access to the stored materials.

Thoughts?