Have you considered the inequities that such a retention policy introduces into HOW history can be used?

The entrepreneurial (and governments) will archive everything to serve the wealthy (including governments), who will be able to use history to their ends. Those without resources will live in an eternal present, except where history is used against them.

To sell this kind of retention policy as a user-protecting feature is (in my view) at best naive, and at worst, disingenuous. This model increases the economic cost of mining history, but in doing so, entrenches existing wealth and power structures.

Thanks to the ever-decreasing cost-per-bit of storage, the internet is forever. The only hope for redemption lies in this permanence affecting everyone equally; otherwise we're doomed to (continue to) live in a world where only the wealthy and politically connected have read and write access to history.

There is an argument to be made there, but you're off on the difficulty of storing data. Reddit, even with its 250M+ users, generates only 8.5Gb per month of data. A $100 Western Digital hard drive could hold the entirety of Reddit's comment history. In other words, if you want to collect data, you can do it just as well if you're just a random guy on the street just as well as any government can. Aether can't prevent anyone from collecting data, just like Snapchat also cannot. But what it can do is that it can reduce the availability of historic data as much as possible, so the data is at least not accidentally collected.

> ... but in doing so, entrenches existing wealth and power structures.

What entrenches existing wealth and power structures is wealth and power. That's why it's valuable to have wealth and power. In other words, you could prefix that sentence with almost anything, and you'd still be right.