Do you mean it's not a bad idea to use the idle upload bandwidth to distribute the updates, i.e. turn each PC into a bittorrent seed?
In theory it's pretty great, in practice, with metered connections you're using up the users internet quota and causing a lot of frustration.
I am used to unmetered internet connections, and after moving to the UK I've spent a lot of time investigating why I'm getting an insane amount of packet loss. I'm talking 30% on weekend evenings.
Long story short, a flatmate was uploading data all day without noticing, the ISP's traffic management kicked in, limited our bandwidth, buffers aren't infinite so packets get dropped [1].
As someone said in a similar thread, this may be the reason for ISPs to drop traffic metering and upload quotas, but I somehow doubt this'll happen.
--
1: I've fixed it by limiting the upload quota and bandwidth on my OpenWRT router for that user. I guess I'll have to enable this rule for all other Windows 10 users in my house now.
A huge number of people in the UK are on BT's cheapest package, you get a 38mb FTTC connection and a 20gb cap. These are the sort of people who won't even know that a feature like this could even exist, talk about be switched off! I think it's almost criminal that 20gb capped Internet can be advertised as being suitable for a family home in 2015.
In a world where data caps are acceptable by ISPs, p2p is definitely not a viable solution yet and to have this be automated rather than opt-in is irresponsible at best. I'm not sure exactly how it works on their side, but to use up a person's data without their explicit permission is pretty bad in my opinion. For example, in my area and a bunch of others Comcast has a 300GB cap, I'm assuming there are other ISPs in other areas who also do data caps. People have to be mindful of their data in the current world we live in, to use it up without permission is a fairly dick-ish move. I feel the ISPs are more at fault than Microsoft, but Microsoft should be aware of the current ISP climate. My opinion.
If you setup the internet connection as metered (available since windows 8) it will not send updates to machines over the internet.
Not sure if MSFT does this for Comcast but my Windows 10 machine detected the internet connection of 4G dongles (even when it was over normal Ethernet) and prompted me to confirm if it's a metered connection or not.
On a metered connection Windows 10 (as 8.1 before it) is extremely bandwidth conservative it doesn't pull non-critical updates, and other online features such as updating cards, cortana, store function etc. went into austerity mode as well.
What you call "nutty" I call "a dial-up Internet connection" or "a congested network due to streaming content or large downloads." If Win10 only did this while the entire network is guaranteed to be idle, and if it can guarantee it is on a landline DSL or better connection whose usage isn't tracked, then it would be okay.
But it's highly unlikely that Microsoft can make those guarantees. If this were a robust system, people (especially Microsoft!) would be championing it! But it's clearly not.
If Win10 only did this while the entire network is guaranteed to be idle, and if it can guarantee it is on a landline DSL or better connection whose usage isn't tracked, then it would be okay.
In any jurisdiction where you can in practice be held responsible for any data uploaded from your own Internet connection, it's still not OK to upload anything automatically without permission.
This "feature" is turned on automatically. You need to proactively turn it off. Who gave Microsoft the right to decide how I use my bandwidth? And in those cases where I decided to share it I explicitly did so. I wonder how many unsuspecting people know that this is happening.
