After Unity's clarifications, I'm honestly kind of expecting the old "null-route the web address in the HOSTS file" to be a valid method to prevent their installer from phoning home to increment the counter. It's gonna be incredible if people start trying that just to frick with Unity.
The fact that we can even have this discussion should be proof enough to Unity that it's a complete non-starter of an idea to let user behavior influence the developer bottom-line.