This is why data caps are bad. Left open all month that could be 400+ GB of data used on your plan.
Ad networks are being subsidized by data caps and personal/business broadband costs. Maybe if ad serving went through the main host and their own bandwidth then maybe ad networks would have a reason to control this abuse of transfer.
Or on the flip side. Data caps will make people care about how much data their site uses. Cause customers will stop using data heavy sites as they have economic insentive not to.
Making the web all around faster as no more 10MiB webpages, and making the industry move back to server side rendering.
It's not easy to discover how much data usage a specific site triggers. Android reports data usage per app, if you dig into the right preference panel, but that's not going to tell you anything about specific websites.
I'd like a notification to pop up when the current usage (within, say, a 3 minute window) exceeds my typical usage. That'd make it easier to notice a website started autoplaying a (muted) video, for instance. It's also something that could be done at the operating system level. The operating system could also conceivably show traffic by domain, but that's not ideal; you want traffic by referrer domain, ie. if the LA Times embeds megabytes of images from some random third party server, those should be aggregated under latimes.com and not under some meaningless CDN domain. But the OS probably doesn't have that information.
Of course browser vendors could add more detailed reporting. Say a brief in-browser notification ("Page finished downloading 5 MB.") after initial load is complete and repeating if excessive downloading continues. I guess that could annoying really fast, though. A less annoying alternative would be a special page (e.g. "about:data-usage") that has an overview per page in a user-selectable time range. Maybe link to it from the browser start page.
I know we can easily get some info from chrome dev tools and chrome://net-internals/#bandwith. It would be convenient for users if someone put together an extension that would display this information by default, or alternatively browsers just had a setting we could turn on.
Perhaps not – I don't think it's the browser makers job to figure out what terms the current connection has (and for the vast majority of workstation desktops there are no such terms, I think; you're getting a pretty rough deal if you pay by the byte on a fixed connection, no matter the price).
It has been years since data caps though, and years of obnoxious ads, nothing has changed.
The only way in my opinion to fix this is to (a) give phones HARD preferences on maximum data that cannot be exceeded and (b) give web browsers even stricter per-site settings with sane defaults. Then, let the ad companies fight within themselves to figure out how to deal with the fact that none of their content gets through anymore. Force them to innovate into smaller form factors.
In the US, and on wired connection maybe. In NZ the largest mobile plan I can even find has 5GB. Another one with flat rate for data is $50 for 3GB (so $250 for this 14GB day). If I load a webpage on my mobile data that uses 10MB of data, I want to know about it so I can shut that down (and never come back.)
I'd like to a see, or at least think about, a system in which everyone pays for egress and no one pays for ingress. That way the LA Times is welcome to throw as much crap as they want at you without charging you much. (One issue is that egresss is involved in every request. Some UI work would be needed to make this work well.)
Universal egress fees would go a long way to mitigating DDoS, too.
Why not? If you have a water leak, you get a high bill and then you can ask your water agency to refund you if you fix the leak. ISTM being infected and spewing data could be handled similarly.
Currently there is effectively no incentive to avoid having a gadget that joins a botnet.
I'm curious what you're thinking of specifically, because I can't imagine any remotely reasonable way to make egress fees work from a technical standpoint, let alone widespread acceptance and adoption. You browse to a site, you can read all the articles you want, but you can't load any other sites until you pay?
Ad networks are being subsidized by data caps and personal/business broadband costs. Maybe if ad serving went through the main host and their own bandwidth then maybe ad networks would have a reason to control this abuse of transfer.