Great for speeding up browsing on a limited connection, pointless for energy savings
We know from this research that video conferencing has a notable emissions impact, which could only be a consequence of energy consumption. Bandwidth doesn’t just cost energy at home but also all the servers and equipment that carry the payload upstream to the other end.
Video conferencing is like sending low resolution images with many diffs. Still images in a browser would be higher res (and bigger with higher pixel addressability), though much fewer in numbers, but still considerably more consumption than text.
Btw your reverse tethering option probably stopped being maintained because that is now built in to Android
What happens on the server side with recent versions? PCs don’t normally expect network traffic on USB (edit: well, not sure about windows, but not linux AFAIK). Gnirehtet is installed on the PC and it uses ADB to run the mock VPN on the Android.
(edit) Looks like on the linux side it’s just a matter of setting up a bridge with no extra software. But for the Android side every approach I find calls for an app. Does anyone know which Android version introduced built-in reverse tethering?