It is not a contract and there exist a very similar arrangement that has existed for way longer:

commercial radio

I don't incur additional costs for listing to a radio station that decides to play 30 second HD audio ads between segments. Unlike going to a blog to _read_ something and being forced to watch (and pay for the bandwidth) a 30 second HD video. I asked for a few hundred kb of data. They send me what could amount to several hundred megs of data.

Many places in the world still are subject to metered data.

What do you mean of course your endure costs - you're paying for the electricity running the radio, and the wear and tear on your device.

At an effectively constant rate independent of content.

Also a broadcast stream where users pay exactly the same amount for the airwaves (nothing) regardless of how much content gets sent out across it. This is not like an IP stream where you impose a quite literal cost on the receiver by sending more data than they expected.

Commercial radio doesn’t cause me to connect to third party services.