I mentioned it in another comment, but it's to prevent the case where the TV might be connected with an ethernet cable in the future by someone other than me, giving it an opportunity to upload any collected historical data it might have. I'm not actually very worried about that happening, but I already had the thing splayed open so I figured I might as well just gut anything I could get an iron to and didn't plan to use.

My guess is that GP may have been curious if the TV would react poorly to not having being able to phone home via any method, including ethernet.