I'm not saying its easy, its not, but people tend to think that because Google is so huge, you have to be that huge to do what Google does. My argument is that in terms of hardware google need expensive hardware because they have so many users, not because what they do requires that hardware to deliver the service for one or a few users.
I have a gigabit link to my apartment (go Swedish infrastructure!). At that theoretic speed I get 450 gigs an hour, so I could download ten tera in a day. We can easily slow that down by an order of magnitude and its still a very viable thing to do. If someone wrote the software to do this, one could imagine some kind of federated solution for downloading the data, so that every user doesn't have to hit every web server.
