Well Verizon will also charge you regardless of whether or not you actually use all of your allotted data. The difference here is that they'd also like to charge you a second time to let you use your allotted data in different ways.
You aren't paying twice for the same thing because the normal data plan explicitly didn't allow tethering.
However there is an additional fee if you want to use that water to water you lawn, it costs an extra $30 a month to have the water directed to the lawn.
However when industrious home owners decides to water their lawn by hand from sink water and avoid the extra $30 dollars a month the water company cuts their service.
Do you have a problem with the water company segmenting their market in this fashion?
Adobe Photoshop is available to college students at a deep discount. Hobbyists who are not in school have to pay more for the exact same product. That's a little uncool, but is it unethical?
Which is a completely artificial and needless distinction. The phones have the necessary hardware and software and have for years. And that's where the outrage comes from - there is no difference between 5gb transferred over a tethered device and 5gb transferred over the device natively.
They're double dipping. Adding no value and expecting more money for it. And everyone knows it.
This might even be remotely acceptable if the wireless marketplace were in the least bit open. It is not. I can't possibly be the only person to notice that the major carriers plans are almost mirror images of each other.