[teekert]

How do they abuse your privacy without tracking? Of course if they didn't abuse your time and attention they wouldn't make sense. But someone has to be paying Firefox's development, and it is not you. I'll take that last part back if you contribute to Mozilla. Hey, maybe it's an idea for a donation: make a 5$ Firefox without adds. I'd pay. To bad part goes to Google that way.

[makecheck]

The irony is that people pay, just not to the right place. Every unnecessarily-bloated download tears through data plans and costs people money to their ISP that never makes it to the provider.

I want plain-text ads that provide just as much revenue to web sites but without obnoxious experiences and fat downloads.

[palunon]

> Every unnecessarily-bloated download tears through data plans and costs people money to their ISP

Only in third internet world countries like the US... Elsewhere, we don't have limited data plans.

[Karunamon]

This is going to put me in weird company but I really don't see why metered billing is such a terrible thing. Most other utilities are pay-for-amount-used. And as a bonus, this creates an incentive for developers (via customer pressure) to not use insane amounts of data.

[franga2000]

It is because data, unlike water or electricity, isn't a finite resource. Your electricity bill includes the generation in the power plant and the transmission over the power lines. When it comes to Internet access, you're paying for the transmission (bandwidth), but there isn't a "packet generation plant" that you should have to pay for.

Also, data caps mean people will use less data, meaning using less bandwidth, meaning ISPs will have less of an incentive to upgrade their already ancient infrastructure. It would be giving them more money to use less of what they provide.