Hopefully they won't start standardizing TV's that have to phone home periodically and if they are denied this for long enough, refuse to work until they've established a connection to their servers. I'm not aware of anything that does this but it's definitely what will start happening if enough people disable network connectivity to circumvent smart features. This wouldn't worry me too much since I'd likely want to use the device as just a display anyway and plug something useful in to the HDMI but if the whole machine is somehow tied up in these sophisticated operating systems, what if they just disable HDMI until they get their way?

My TV has never been near any Internet connection. The source button on the remote has been clicked once, the color settings has been changed once. The only button in regular use is the on/off button. This is the way.