That’s a great move and I applaud you and also I wonder whether LG would start disabling TVs unable to get their requests through if they noticed a critical mass of them doing that.
They probably wouldn't be allowed to disable the basic functionality of the TV, at least not without marketing it as "online only TV", which wouldn't look good (your internet may fail, or you may want it in a place without internet). LG will disable your "smart features" if you refuse the EULA. But that's actually the optimistic and desired outcome.
The undesirable outcome is that they just hardcode some IPs or DNS in which case PiHole would be of no use. At best you could create a NAT port forward to redirect DNS requests to the PiHole, assuming it's not DoH.
And the worst case scenario is if they build in 5G connection and take the whole connectivity aspect out of your control.
> they just hardcode some IPs or DNS in which case PiHole would be of no use. At best you could create a NAT port forward to redirect DNS requests to the PiHole, assuming it's not DoH.
The idea is that you'll need more than just a PiHole for all of this which further reduces the pool of people who can pull it off. You have to redirect DNS requests to your own DNS server, and/or block 443/DoH completely, neither of which the PiHole or a regular ISP router can do on their own. At this point if you can you're probably better off blocking all outside connectivity from you TV anyway.
I strongly recommend everyone to just reject any and all EULA screens ever presented. At this point at least legally the manufacturer can no longer legally do much which is why they'll disable almost every smart feature, which is essentially "dumbifying" the TV.
As well as this, there are simple ways around things like pihole. Such as DNS over HTTP or even just hardcoding IPs as a fallback. I expect these to become more common as usage of pihole and similar methods increase.
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