I remember those days. GMail was still in beta and ' a big area of concern was "Why won't Google just shut this down when the going gets rough?" '
8 years later GMail has a billion users, and not going anywhere but up.
I haven't been to the future (yet), but I'll happily take any bet you have against BigQuery.
Disclaimer: I'm Felipe Hoffa, and I work at Google. (https://twitter.com/felipehoffa)
The value of an email service is how many users it has.
The value of a big database is... who knows? If Google one day decides the content of that database is a strategic asset, they might just as well decide to shut it down to the public and continue using it internally.
There's a difference between experimental free services and Enterprise-grade SLA'd SLO'd fully-supported paid services with a very clear and recorded deprecation policy and an army of customers with contracts and full support from Google CEO and chairman.
If the answer is "Google" then I think people are still right to be cautious.
Or to invert the question; could I put 1TB of my own 'interesting' data into BigQuery and have Google maintain it in perpetuity for free? If not, then why are any of these datasets considered safer?
You can put 1TB of your own interesting data in BigQuery and pay $0.02/GB/month for the data storage fees. I'm sure Google will happily take your money as a paying customer, and keep your data for as long as you want to store it and pay for it.