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Comment by wccrawford | Hacker News Reader

I just realized: By this same logic, end-users should be paid by advertisers for the bandwidth they were forced to consume for their ads.

I bet that wouldn't go over nearly as well as this.

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They are: the advertisers pays for the service users are consuming. The "free with advertising" business model is an efficient version of

Advertisers give money to users give money to content provider

Where money given to the users == money given to the content provider

> They are: the advertisers pays for the service users are consuming

and the users pay for the service the advertisers are consuming.

It's called currency for a reason... it likes to flow.

This actually blew my mind, lol

as long as it isn't downward

Then it would be called suction, maelstrom or waterfall, sometimes undertow.

That is indeed an interesting point, especially for users who have metered Internet service.

Consider a user with a data cap of 1000GB, is metered as consuming say 1200GB of data, of which 200GB is Ads. The user is forced to pay extra for the 200GB to the ISP which the user should not have had to pay if there were no Ads.

Ignoring that ISPs should not meter the service, the above just doesn't seem right. The individual Internet services may be subsidized by Ads, but the user is paying to the ISP. So, in effect a user is paying, just to a different party.

Some lawyer should definitely look into it and see if there is potential for a class-action against Ad vendors.

Edit: I'm sure the flip argument would be that the user requested the Internet services that came with the Ad, so in effect the user is responsible for consuming the data. But that is where I think it becomes interesting and given that IMNAL I don't know what the legal minds think.

End users generally don't pay for consuming extra bandwidth, so the injury isn't obvious.

SMS spam, though, had a very clear injury when you were charged for the privilege of receiving a message.

On mobile it's very common to have data caps, so end users do pay for the bandwidth used by ads indirectly.

Yeah, data caps was something common a few years ago...

Data caps are very common on phones, but even worse Comcast has implemented data limits across their services for home internet.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90580656/comcast-data-cap-remote...

I have a Google Fi phone and the data isn't capped, but it's $10 / GB.

Not quite. They have a soft 15 Gb cap, past which they throttle you down significantly but also don't charge you. And then it's $10 / Gb if you want to extend that cap.

There's more than one plan. The one I'm on is $10/GB until you use 6 GB (or $60). You're right though that they slow down after 15 GB (not Gb) but I've never come anywhere near that.

The way I look at it is that my plan is $20 then my data is $1 / 100 MB.

On a mobile connection you generally have a data cap, and you can switch to a more expensive plan for a higher cap. That's the same thing as paying for bandwidth, just that you are buying in bulk with pre-commitment.

To get significant damage as a single individual, take someone on a traditional satellite connection who can't get some important work done on time because ads put him above his data cap.

Ah but in a backwards twist my ISP now has a 1Tb per month data cap. You’d think this was huge, but I wanted to download all my games to a new Xbox…

That is a failure of Xbox in my opinion. Games are 100gb these days. Massive. My monthly bandwidth is line 400gb. That is pretty common in Canada. We can’t afford to download all the games, again. There should be a local transfer of games done over wifi. It should be made easy.

Uh, there is?[1]

[1]https://support.xbox.com/en-US/help/hardware-network/console...

Please explain how that logic fits in with the rest of this thread. It was your user agent running on your machine which requested the advertisement.

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