I dont want to be (potentiall forced to) distribute software.
With recent developments in net neutrality and data plans, p2p could drastically impact my data plan and cost me money.
Sure I can see why you would think the potential is, but for me p2p data distribution is out of the question, at least for now.
Just because you have a logical reason to not want to serve updates, should not prevent IT admins from getting a good default experience when they have 1000 machines on a LAN that all want to update.
Pretty much all internet connections are metered/capped, though prior to recent FCC transparency rules the caps on residential fixed broadband were often undisclosed or affirmatively misrepresented under false "unlimited" labels.
Making the OS appropriately sensitive to the costs incurred by each network-involved transaction relating to updates and the system owner's preferences regarding balancing those costs against the value they provide in update experience is abstractly ideal but decidedly difficult.
Note that, even in that case, the connection to the outside world might still be metered/capped—but the connection to LAN peers obviously isn't. That means that "does this traffic cost anything" is an evaluation the OS would have to make per socket (or requested socket from a higher-level library, like Windows' BITS), rather than per interface.
Disclaimer: Haven't checked in a while and can not do it now, but it was there until not long ago.
What I can't remember and am unable to check at the moment is whether Metered is turned on by default or not.
But regardless of defaults, if you mark a connection as Metered than the background update distribution is turned off.
Done respectfully, it can be a great way to make everybody's file arrive faster while balancing the traffic better.
They already have local streaming for games so they have the infrastructure for this.
The solution is to pressure your government to make net neutrality a law and vote with your dollars and use ISPs and network providers that are not intent on breaking the Internet. All Internet nodes need to have the same access to the network. "I am too lazy to do anything about it and too cheap to pay for data" is not a valid argument on a discussion forum called Hacker News.
Seeding a website would be like paying a membership fee with surplus currency that you have been throwing away monthly.
With the proper incentives and controls I suspect there is content you would be compelled to seed.