The clearly problem is to make a good providers/products, you need good product managers and product operation teams, mostly this is not tech related. So from my view, Google is never a good provider.
The optimal way these CDN-monsters such as Akamai/Youtube or netflix edge is pushing the ISPs hosting their servers with minimum or for free ! That's the hard part.
I suggest major cloud providers should exchange their critical services hosting on each other, at least status page or some critical authentication/authorization API functions.
I can guess this will happen soon when working with Azure and found that Microsoft documents had been stored on Github one year ago. I think this is a great deal to push Azure close to the developers and compete with Amazon.
Technically, you can not build DCs globally to support all over the world. In case Cloudflare, their services are quite different to others, for Dropbox the problem is cost saving and customers, sure they don't have much customers in Asia or China.
For just encrypted storage like Apple icloud, abusing cloud providers might be the best way to go. If they want to provider premium Icloud such as "Swiss-like", they could build their DCs below ground under granite rocks ...
At least, by posting on [HN] for free, you can target and engage at least [me]. Honestly, I watch youtube on my TV with chromecast and rarely see ADs, may be google did not show ads on their products.