Unrelated to the narrow task of file hosting, but entirely related to the missions of those nonprofit organizations. Some of the fees go towards the cost for hosting subsequent iterations of the very conferences the papers were presented at
While peer review isn’t perfect - it’s helpful. Arxiv isn’t peer reviewed. Most things in ACM journals and conferences are. That process costs money because it takes people and time to do it well. Journal subscriptions are often not enough to recover those costs.
As for sci-hub? They’re just taking the finished work. It’s like saying software shouldn’t cost much because The Pirate Bay can deliver software for free.
I don't think the authors get paid either. So, no pay to authors nor reviewers. Does the editorial board get paid? Perhaps not.
> > That process costs money because it takes people and time to do it well. Journal subscriptions are often not enough to recover those costs.
Some of the items left to consider here are actually putting together the reviewed papers and publishing them. I would say the cost of these two items has gone down with the extended use of computers over the last 3 decades.
What other items are left? It would be interesting to know.
The actual marginal cost for a digital publication is negligible, as demonstrated by arxiv.org, archive.org, and sci-hub.
The reason why ACM and IEEE charge so much for digital library access is that they use the money for unrelated purposes.