[bri3d]

Users with data caps are an obvious reason, for example, see this frustrated user report here: https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/415181794/chrome-al... .

To your point about `fetch` in the sibling comment; yes, I would also be annoyed by a website which downloaded 4GB in the background without asking me, too.

I don't think this is some moral outrage, to be clear; it's well within Google's rights, it doesn't seem "sketchy" at all, and it is kind of a cool feature, but it feels like they could have done a lot better by just making it opt-in and a little less fingerprintable.

[tantalor]

It doesn't make much sense to tie this to Chrome itself.

If an app or site uses too much bandwidth, it would be better to control this at the OS level, perhaps with a required user notification and consent. Or throttle certain apps.

It's common to set an alert for total data usage, which makes sense so you don't get surprised when you run out of data. That could be extended to watch the usage rate and alert by some threshold, or a projection on the total, like "hey at the current rate, you are going to hit your limit in N minutes".