I'm a person of a group mentality and we work together to make a better world, etc, etc, but not everyone has that mentality.
If we work together we could make a lot of things happen, but we have plenty of folks who want to abuse these things for their own advantage, which I can't begrudge them, it's really their choice and it's really not their concern how it effects anyone else; especially when every one of us is breaking our ToS to do it.
Do I like that answer? Not at all, but I'm looking at the bigger picture beyond just bandwidth hogs. Either way it sucks.
I don't see Verizon being able to shut down tethering, at the very least they would offer a tethering package you have to pay for, hit high usage with an overage and go on their way. They DO NOT want to lose the backing from Google with this deal. I mean, if Google is willing to remove themselves from parts of a country, why wouldn't they pull out from one cell phone company.
I think Verizon is trying to figure out how this 'free' tethering is really impacting their servers and bandwidth to come up with a compromise in future devices. Isn't the Palm Pre able to hot spot? (I think it's that phone, haven't looked at this stuff in a bit)
I think we are their live testers at this point, but that's just my opinion not fact.