it's real: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10795344

See also: https://www.mysociety.org/2011/08/11/mobile-operators-breaki... where O2 stripped JS comments, without checking to see whether those comment delimiters were part of a string.

Yes, the unfortunate reality is a lot of places have de-facto monopolies in the US, but the monopolies get to claim there is still a free market by pointing to dial up or spotty satellite connections.

The user might not have another provider capable of fulfilling their needs. Either too laggy, too slow, too expensive, unacceptable data caps, or not mobile. It's completely possible for the user to live in an area where slow DSL is their only broadband option, the cell phone signal is weak, and the user can't afford satellite.

…locked in on a contract for 2 years, provided for them by their company, provided for them by their family, etc etc.

I think all mobile providers in UK do it, especially around downgrading images.

At that point I would either be switching providers to someone who didn't mangle my signal (because that's effectively what this is), or if that for some reason wasn't doable, I would at least install a VPN to a known secure, untampered connection (like my home router) and route everything through that connection.

Having someone intercept my signal and process it behind my back is simply not something I would tolerate from any communications-service provider I employ.

You are part of a tiny minority who has the technical interest / proficiency to do this.

To my knowledge Three UK doesn't. That's based on using them and not noticing any degradation, or the click-to-view-original-quality javascript that T-Mobile were (are?) injecting.

Comcast: https://www.aaron-gustafson.com/notebook/the-network-effect/

Some also block JS (sometimes accidentally). Remember Sky? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/28/sky-broad...

Vodafone (Fiji) used to do this.

They did honour the 'Cache-Control: no-transform' header though, so every site I build now includes that directive.