There is an escape, for now: stop connecting things to the internet when they don't need to be. Of course, there is nothing stopping the industry from replacing HDMI with a standard that must include an internet connection...
Technically, you can encode whatever the hell you want over an HDMI cable. Whether or not the terminating end is able to receive/interpret it is a different story, however. The cost of implementing end-to-end-Ethernet-over-HDMI is so high that it would almost certainly be prohibitive to modern production, much less the production capabilities of 2013, when the spec for HDMI 2.0 was released.
2x such 6ft cables for $8.50.
Sure, it's prohibitive, yeah. ;)