That's true. The problem is that even when you pay for service, the incentive is to suck your data away, data-mine the hell out of it and hold you at ransom.

It's like cable TV, originally one paid a premium to avoid advertisements. Today it's just the norm, and you get the advertisements anyway.

Both of these are true. We're moving towards walled gardens in the cloud, but within these cloud, your "files" are becoming rows in a highly sophisticated database, perhaps in addition to blobs in a highly sophisticated object storage system.

But it doesn't matter because you - the user - aren't exposed to the benefits or even the abstraction of that database. You don't get to make arbitrary queries for metadata. You get access to whatever half-featured interface the vendor bothered to implement, whereas the database is optimized for their operational and datamining purposes.