That's slightly different. You aren't paying them to store that specific content, you are paying to rent space in their service. They guarantee that space to be available for whatever SLA they have and for as long as the service exists. If they shut down the service, you are still SOL on that content if you don't have it backed up locally.
Contrast that to "buying a digital movie". You are paying to access that content, at that time, and as long as it's made available on whatever service you paid for it. The latter part is the kicker. My argument is that if I can't download it in a usable format independent of the platform "selling" it, I didn't buy it. I rented it. Buying digital movies is just renting them for a longer time frame, unless they let you download it.
I always argue with the less tech savvy people in my life that it's like buying a car vs. leasing a car. If you buy it, it's yours, period. If you lease it, it's not truly yours. You have to give it back when the lease is up, or buy out the lease. You don't truly own it until after that. The media companies just don't offer the "buy out the ease, later", part. While Microsoft retired the whole service, these companies also have this issue when they let media agreements expire with content producers. You buy a movie, but then they decide not to renew their agreement with Paramount? You just lost access to that movie.
Ad companies are getting butt-hurt because the pages you are referencing are being seen even less, due to AI scraping by search engines. So now they are going after:
The consumer using an ad blocker. Last amount of protections/rights, easiest target to vilify.
The search engines, for stealing content views where ads would be placed
The publishers for allowing users that use ad blockers.
They got nearly $8 billion in the CHIPS act less than a year ago, and they are still laying off? I'm guessing they lit that money on fire with stock buybacks, as is tradition.
Getting charged to check the balance seems...not legal? I dunno, probably not. Some politician that also owns a payday lending company would probably ensure that's legal.
Mostly, but it's not perfect.