I'm not sure I completely understand. Are you recommending people shop around? Do you want someone to develop a service to shop around for storage? Or, do you simply want a cheaper competitor?
Thanks for the comment. I just edited the post to try to make it clearer.
I'm proposing that anyone could start a company, Foo Inc, who would sell redundant storage and compete with S3. Instead of operating your own hard drives, you rent hard drives connected to the Internet from a variety of providers. Of course your customer would know that you were doing this, and advanced customers could even choose their own blend of raw storage providers to optimize for different things.
Towards the end of the post I mention briefly that instead of a startup (Foo Inc), this ecosystem could be set up in a decentralized way (think Bitcoin v.s. central banking), though that is far less realistic.
