I only mention the recent events as one reason. Aside from that, it serves no purpose as I have other more elaborate network equipment that does need 'connectivity checks' to operate in the same...

@Richardj186 Can the feature be removed and the product still function?

Does the product need to do connectivity requests to ebay, netflix, reddit, etcetera every 15 minutes? What purpose does that serve exactly?

In light of current US investigations into TP-Link for facilitating Distributed Denial of Service attacks from business and consumer networking products, I request removal of the code in TP-Link...