Both of my two-year Sprint contracts had language saying tethering was verboten. Four years later, I'm still a happy Sprint customer, and tethering still works just fine. Judging by the Treocentral and Pre Central forums, there are millions of users like me who've never had a problem, and only a handful of folks who've been banned for abuse/overuse. Why would they start cracking down now?

Yeah, they're free to do whatever they want, whether it's applying pressure on the wiki admins or updating the firmware in the future to block tethering. But I don't see why they'd be concerned about light volume tethering using a not-at-all-user-friendly hack that only a small subset of users will bother to deal with. If they block it and there are no workarounds, I'll complain, but I'll live.

My hunch is that Sprint doesn't want tethering to be user-friendly, as I'm sure they want to sell their mobile broadband cards/plans. But with Apple's giant head start in terms of application availability, I think they'll want to take a hands-off approach to most hacking efforts.

In the end, even if Sprint decides to get Gung Ho about blocking tethering, I think the hackers will win as they usually do, and I'll have some mechanism for tethered EVDO access when I really need it.