Say the complaint were amended to claim excessive data transfer over the Internet, based on the major cellular ISPs' overage rate. Cellular, satellite, and DSL in Iowa are all metered.

As I understand the logic, it's "If your apps didn't attempt to communicate over the network without my asking each time, my battery wouldn't be drained and my carrier wouldn't charge me overages."

Because cellular carriers in the U.S. have determined that the majority of cellular customers in the U.S. are willing to take such abuse rather than moving to Europe. See the Slashdot story "AT&T: Don't Want a Data Plan for That Smartphone? Too Bad."

Yes. This is why YouTube never implemented Theora, waiting until VP8 (which roughly compares to AVC baseline) before adding any free codecs.

Why wouldn't the new codec be GPGPU-accelerated too?

True, if it is impractical to deploy a new codec in the field alongside the existing codecs, a first mover will win. This is why U.S. OTA digital television is stuck on DVD/SVCD era codecs, but some countries whose digital transition happened later use H.264.

Long haul yes, last mile no. Satellite and cellular ISPs tend to charge on the order of $10 per GB. Even wired home ISPs such as Comcast and Verizon have been practicing "congestion by choice", refusing to peer with L3.

In theory you can get around the patents and carrier restrictions by paying a low, low fee of a few hundred billion dollars to hostile-takeover the major patent holders and a carrier.

A decade from now, most major web video streams will be in H.265 (HEVC), and H.266 will be the Next Big Thing(tm). By the time the patents on one codec have run out, bandwidth constraints cause providers of non-free media to switch to a new freshly patented codec. Users end up stuck on a treadmill, from H.261 to MPEG-1 to MPEG-2 to H.263 family (Sorenson Spark, DivX, Xvid) to H.264 (AVC) and so on.

"Voluntary" only in the sense that one would have to buy and carry two handsets otherwise. U.S. cellular carriers tend to refuse to sell plans with no data at all to users of devices whose IMEI matches that of a smartphone.

Which such phone, other than the Fire Phone by Amazon, is sold in the United States?

We're whining that all products sold near us are designed to do something that we find undesirable.

But with cellular carriers billing by the bit, users in Google's home country "pay in both ways", namely bandwidth overages and eyeball time.

As I understand it, the Fire Phone is the only non-Apple phone that streams Amazon video.

Same here. I've routinely had ten tabs of Cracked.com, which is fairly heavy as far as I can tell, fit in half a GB. But then I use Flashblock to keep SWFs from starting automatically on most sites, and I have a few Facebook hostnames blocked in my /etc/hosts.

Well you have now. Often I've made musical recordings as proofs of concept for posts to web forums related to Dance Dance Revolution and classic NES games. And when these aren't in tracker format, they're in .ogg format. Here are some test cases:

• 10.2.2.: original piano ambient composition
• Onderheynah: original rhythmic noise composition
• Dam Dam Baby Baram, Lodeamari Bombacy, Messimizer, Overplayed, and Zodinubis: mash-ups of similar-sounding songs from video games
• Balloon Fever and Birdo's Theme: remixes of NES games' music
• Butterfly and Maxx Unlimited: covers of DDR songs using hardware limits of the NES
• Gymnopedie 1: beginning of a cover of an Erik Satie piece in the musical style of a Kirby game

If the "malware blocking" is anything like the analogous feature in Internet Explorer (called "SmartScreen"), then it's going to be harder for end users to download and install a newly compiled executable release of an application developed and self-published by an individual, even if that program is distributed under a free software license. IE repeatedly warns users that if an executable is "not commonly downloaded" by other IE users participating in SmartScreen, it should be deleted on sight, especially if the developer hasn't paid protection money to a member of the Authenticode CA cartel.

In some cases, it's either deploy one JavaScript web app or deploy 15 native apps, one for each of 15 platforms. You can get the web app designed, implemented, tested, and deployed before you even become approved as a developer on half of those platforms.