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>I cannot control how much data I consume. Especially now with more and more websites being so big. And no, not every device supports uBlock Origin. Pi-Hole / Adguard only does so much these days.

This might be technically true but for all practical purposes it's irrelevant. When your data cap is 1TB, random websites' ads or autoplay videos don't make a dent. Most of the actual usage is stuff that you can control: youtube/netflix, games, even os updates are pretty consistently sized that you can't plausibly plead "I couldn't control how much data I was using!" as you blow past your 1TB quota.

You are forgetting multi-user and multi-device homes. My grandma has 3 Apple devices by herself; that would be 24GB of updates, or ~2.4% of a 1TB cap just for her Apple updates. Stick 4 of her in a house and it’s nearly 10% of the cap just for that.

A single Steam game can easily be 50GB, so there’s another 5%.

It’s also an unreasonable burden for multi-user homes. Does anyone actually want to coordinate who gets to watch Netflix this month and who won’t be playing multiplayer games on Steam because they’re not allowed to download patches? Does that actually seem reasonable?

>You are forgetting multi-user and multi-device homes. My grandma has 3 Apple devices by herself; that would be 24GB of updates, or ~2.4% of a 1TB cap just for her Apple updates. Stick 4 of her in a house and it’s nearly 10% of the cap just for that.

3 computing devices per person in a family of four seems... questionable. Besides a phone and maybe a laptop/tablet, any other device are typically shared, so that extrapolation wouldn't hold. Moreover ios devices is probably the worst case scenario. Pixel device updates are around 3GB, and windows updates are around 1GB.

>A single Steam game can easily be 50GB, so there’s another 5%.

Great, there still 85% for netflix and tiktok.

>It’s also an unreasonable burden for multi-user homes. Does anyone actually want to coordinate who gets to watch Netflix this month and who won’t be playing multiplayer games on Steam because they’re not allowed to download patches? Does that actually seem reasonable?

I mean if you blow your share of the quota on 800GB worth of steam games, leaving little for everyone else, that seems entirely on you? Give everyone a budget and get them to stick to it. If they can do it for cellular data I don't see why they can't do it for wifi.

Well I have a windows laptop, a mac laptop, a desktop, an iPad, a Steam Deck, a Nintendo Switch, a Quest 3, and a smartphone that I use regularly (well the iPad I don't really use much anymore, but I keep it updated).

My partner has a macbook, a mac mini, a windows laptop, an iPad, a Nintendo Switch, and a smartphone that she uses regularly.

That's 14 computing devices right there. For a family of two, not even four.

That's not including additional laptops we need for work.

Granted we probably don't represent a typical family.

Also most Steam games nowadays are 80GB-150+GB (Baldur's Gate 3 is 148GB, for example).

Which makes services like Xbox Game Pass less desirable, since you have to fully download and install all these new AAA games you might want to just try out for a few hours (or only take like 6 hours to get through their single player campaign).

I have to limit the downloads of those to 1 or sometimes 2 big games per month usually, and I go out of my way to transfer the games to external hard drives so I don't have to redownload them when I want to go back to them, which is something I never bothered doing before. I also watch a lot of Youtube videos at 360p to save bandwidth for other things, like Netflix.

Not to mention cloud storage and backup that everything uses. Every photo or video you take is also consuming your data.

> 3 computing devices per person in a family of four seems... questionable.

Really? Phone+desktop and then either a work or school device depending on age. 3 seems fairly standard to me these days, and I’m surprised anyone here would balk at that.

That 85% isn’t just for Netflix and TikTok. That’s Spotify (8GB of mobile data on my phone this month, with the local saving on), browsing (4GB of mobile data for me this month), work calls or RDP if a need to WFH arises, security systems, etc. 15% of an entire months data caps on OS updates is an insane situation, 3rd world countries have better connectivity than that. It’s an embarrassment.

Steam will also absolutely chew through that. Anyone who games as a hobby is likely getting upwards of 100GB of patches a week just playing a few live service games.

> If they can do it for cellular data I don't see why they can't do it for wifi.

The whole premise of that being reasonable is that you have a way to avoid it by using WiFi.

I don’t even particularly hate the concept of charging by volume. What I hate is charging by rate and by volume, and making the volume charges extortionate. They’re utterly absurd, and exceed the cost of production to a degree that ought to trigger an investigation.

> iOS / Mac updates are humongous. 100+MB per webview-wrapper app. And they aren't sharable. iOS 18.1 today was 8GB. How many Apple devices do you have?

Are you sure they can't be shared? See https://support.apple.com/en-us/102860 and https://support.apple.com/guide/deployment/intro-to-content-...

Disclaimer: I haven't tested this.

Disclaimer: I haven't tested this.

I have. Seems to work as advertised. You do need to have a Mac around.

The ads and background data alone takes extreme advantage of users that have low data caps. There is no way that users should be arbitrarilly metered in an age where content is forced down our throats with no choice over it all.

They either need to ban auto play ads, or get rid of caps. Actually I'd even go a step further and say that no-login wifi should be a public right... It's already insecure to use wifi at all of these private company stores like Starbucks anyway, and the companies are literally using connections to spy on what everyone does... If we continue down the path of extreme ad proliferation, the least companies could do is distribute free wifi networks as a country-wide mesh of free internet ad spam connections.

We're paying more now than ever for Internet Services, the least they could do is make sure it's unlimited fully.

uBlock origin runs everywhere a web browser will.

I’m sending this from the Orion Browser on iOS, with the Firefox versions of ublock origin and privacy badger turned on. Every other platform that runs a modern browser (safari or chromium derivatives) runs firefox natively.

That doesn’t invalidate your other points, of course!

Can you move? I know many can't.

Since the ISPs collude to gain a local monopoly over entire apartments, sometimes cities, sometimes states [1], ideally your response would be to de-occupy them, the same as if state police decided to disproportionately shoot at you because of your race.

[1] https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadbloc...

Yep, having all the minority and cosmopolitan voters move out of the state will certainly teach racist politicians a lesson on election day!

Have you tried intentionally griefing their gerrymandering?

This has 'just be rich' vibes.

this means we need more visibility on what's sucking up so much data. and then we need to start boycotting and deleting any and all apps that insist on wasting so much data. i bet, those services and sites that are so huge will quickly clean up their act once we all stop using them. Or they'll just go out of business and we can choose some better ones.

But why? Packets aren't finite. We only care about how much data because they're charging for it, not because it's relevant.

If someone charged based on how long packets were in transit on their network or the time under load, wouldn't those provide similar but better outcomes?

Firefox has a setting to disable autoplay (on mobile data)

> cannot control how much data I consume... > iOS / Mac updates are humongous

That's definitely something you can control