I thought the issue was they wanted search engines to be able to see the content, but not non paying viewers? Hence slightly shitty paywalls.

The older and shittier the ISP the more blocks of IPV4 addresses they have. They have blocks from when they were given out willy nilly.

New ISPs, the ones that compete and bring the prices down have to buy addresses and that costs money and is a cost bigger and older ISPs do not have.

This is a case for regulation - either mandating a move to V6 or mandating the release of stockpiled v4 addresses. ISPs will not do that on their own, the addresses can currently be sold for lots of money.

That’s what they want. Consume ads, pay or stop using bandwidth.

I am unsure how much they care about views when so many have adblockers. It will be a useful metric when the huge majority can not block ads.