No; contrary to popular belief, most people who make money are not daytrading. There is no downtick rule for index arbs; thus they are selling short stock on downticks all the time without options anyway.
When Program Traders are trading selling a basket of DOW stocks, I assume they like everyone else is using bullets to get short. volatility will eventually get killed. Anyone have a real time scan of Beta/Volatility on specific stocks relative to their past trading history, i.e. historical volatility? Would be interesting to see the vols on those stocks today.
Only when curbs come in do they get restricted. In exchange for being able to short without a downtick, they have all sorts of registration requirements as program traders.