So your convenience trumps the impact you’re causing to global infrastructure? Yes, you’re just one among millions, but still a slippery slope.
Honestly? Yes.
Should I want TP-Link to fix it? Maybe. Should pressure be put on TP-Link to fix it? Yes.
But not by consumers. It isn't the responsibility of a random consumer that has no idea what an NTP server even is to understand whether or not the TP-Link router is going the "right thing" for all sorts of use cases they've never even heard of it.
From a consumer perspective, does TP-Link build a good product? Yes. And that's all consumers care about.
The pragmatic reality of the situation is if this is an issue, the public service providers need to do something about it.
You cannot expect consumers to worry about or even know about this sort of thing. They don't care. They'll never care. This blog post won't make these random consumers that see it as a highly rated product on e-commerce websites care. TP-Link won't care when the niche population of people that care about this don't buy their product because we're not the market.
If the NTP pool cares about what TP-Link is doing, they should reach out to TP-Link about it, and if there's no co-operation, be public about it.
Pissing into the wind on a random 3rd party blog about how consumers should switch because of something 99.9% of consumers don't care about isn't going to accomplish anything, whether we a conscientious net citizens should care or not.
Your attitude kind of reminds of the people that toss their cigarettes out their car window. When confronted they'll say something like "But my car doesn't have an ashtray, this is easier" or "But I don't want used cigarette butts in my car" or "What am I hurting? It's only one cigarette, and there are volunteers that clean up my cigarette butts from the roadside" or "If it was really a problem, they'd enforce it better, I've never been given a ticket for it"
Notably, they are ignoring the ones that make it possible for NTP to be aware of the problem in the first place. Right now, TP-link's traffic probably just looks like millions of unrelated devices misconfigured. NTP wants vendors like this to make requests to a particular subdomain so they can identify problematic vendors in the first place.
> The firmware of some TP-Link repeaters — but not routers — including all 2017 models ... --TFA