Lord_Majestic - 3:17 pm on Aug 12, 2004 (gmt 0)

That is not to say that indexing tables etc. should be included but raw cached copies of web pages should be available to purchase for the cost of the storage media plus an allowance for duplication.

Due to the way Google indexes data it is possible to re-construct meaningful text from the index itself - if you ban cached data then search engines will just provide reconstruction data, even better it will be cheaper to them since index has to be stored anyway.

You also fail to appreciate that it cost a lot in terms of bandwidth to get all these pages - 1 GB of data has got a non-zero cost of getting.