Data caps or outright banning traffic to certain IP ranges does not necessarily reduce the costs for the ISP. For many ISPs, you are negotiating on bandwidth, not on total data rendered to the backbone, and you find your peak bandwidth needs are being generated when everyone is online and saturating their access between 7-10pm every night.
Bandwidth usage whales are just those that constantly use the bandwidth they paid for - which, outside of those peak traffic windows, isn't actually costing you anything to provide, because you aren't saturating your bandwidth anyway.
If ISPs want to cut costs, they rate limit customers (globally or during their peak usage times). That reduces the amount of routing hardware they need and the amount of backbone bandwidth they need to buy. If they institute data caps or try to break the Internets P2P architecture, they are just destroying the intent of the Internet while still having the same peak bandwidth rates they always did. Their routers just run cold now at night because nobody is using them for anything.
Bandwidth usage whales are just those that constantly use the bandwidth they paid for - which, outside of those peak traffic windows, isn't actually costing you anything to provide, because you aren't saturating your bandwidth anyway.
If ISPs want to cut costs, they rate limit customers (globally or during their peak usage times). That reduces the amount of routing hardware they need and the amount of backbone bandwidth they need to buy. If they institute data caps or try to break the Internets P2P architecture, they are just destroying the intent of the Internet while still having the same peak bandwidth rates they always did. Their routers just run cold now at night because nobody is using them for anything.