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To me it feels very different.

Imagine for a moment that in order to access NASA data sets you had to have a Fastmail email account. Gmail won't work, Outlook won't work, it has to be Fastmail alone.

That would be very objectionable (as much as I adore Fastmail).

Ability to pay one specific cloud provider should not be a gate for public domain government data.

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I don't think this analogy works. For Fastmail, there is a cost regardless of whether you want to access government data. You have to pay for the account itself. For most cloud providers, there is zero cost for having an account. Even if they hosted this themselves, they could just as likely charge for data transfer costs...and get to choose how to collect that. They could choose PayPal and you have to create an account. Or they take credit cards...and you must have a card belonging to one of the networks they support. The barrier to entry doesn't change regardless of how many cloud providers there are, all it does is increase infrastructure costs unnecessarily.

The alternative here, though, to get comparable distribution / durability, etc. by spending way more of the public's money upfront regardless of who wanted it. I get the purist / idealistic argument here, but it feels a bit like cutting off one's nose to spite their face.

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