[ised]

What I find amusing about this is that in addition to taking the money on the table by serving mobile ads, the carriers are also charging their customers for "data".

All the mobile ad and other cruft just increases the amount of data used by the customer.

Imagine if customers were only charged for the actual content. Is CSS, fonts and Javascript "content"? I guess it depends who you ask.

As a user, I rarely turn on Javascript, yet I still download heaps of it (then filter it out client-side). For me, this is totally unnecessary data usage.

[thehal84]

it is no different then cable TV. You pay to watch all those commercials. In Canada the largest Carriers also happen to be Cable providers.

[mattzito]

It's a little different - in effect, the amount of TV I watch has no impact on the cost to me from my cable provider.

In this case, the more ads you consume, potentially the more you pay from your wireless carrier.

[fieryeagle]

A way to look at cable TV is like a buffet. Everything is paid for in advanced. In a buffet, you can eat until you bust and the restaurant would still break even with the food cost at worst. Most cases, profit. The rest of users always make up for the revenue 'losses' caused by a small set of anomalies. This double income from ads and data only happened because your carriers were allowed to get away with placing data caps on wireless. In some distance past, we used to get limits on broadbands too, remember?

[Ironchefpython]

It would be more analogous if cable providers charged you by the minute for TV service. Each commercial would essentially be double billed.