> ...we have tried to minimize the impact on real readers as much as possible. We have not gone with tools like Anubis, partly because it causes annoying delays for those trying to get to the site, but also partly because it seems inevitable that the scrapers will eventually find their way around it. Indeed, there are some indications that is already happening. A proof-of-work requirement is not a huge obstacle when you have millions of other people's machines to do the work on.
It's massively less annoying than a captcha, which is both a longer delay (typically, at present) and a massive cognitive distraction/roadblock.
The anubis author has stated they recognize it's an arms race, but PoW scales. Captchas and other signals are already at the end of the road; any additional difficulty increases false bot-positives, which are already unacceptably high.
For websites running dynamic languages, a binary (anubis is in go) sentry that operates before[1] the website is forced to expend any resources, is usually a large improvement over a site-hosted captcha. I would rather, and I think most humans would agree, have to wait a few seconds, maybe even closer to a minute in the future, to get a website access token good for a day or a week, than be forced to solve a captcha.
The dilemma for bots: when tokens are bound to the connecting ip, scrapers must limit the connecting IP pool for each site they want to scrape, becoming much more obvious and easy to block, or they have to use massive amounts of compute.
[1] this is true regardless of whether anubis is in reverse proxy mode or auth mode.
show comments
mips_avatar
I feel like the solution is a better common crawl. As nice as it would be to block the frontier AI labs from getting access to information, we should reset the baseline of information accessibility so there's less marginal advantage on these labs.
I worry a lot of the anti scraping rhetoric will just injure the open web and put somebody like cloudflare in charge.
show comments
georgyo
The article at the end talks about how is very easy for arbitrary apps from app stores can install a residential proxy on your phone.
10 years ago, apps had to explicitly state if they needed network access. And then the powers that be decided that really all apps need network access no matter what. And both ios and android make it hard to deny apps network access.
But really, this finally explains the hordes of really basic boring games that just advertise other boring games. Idle games and the like that really just want you to keep your phone unlocked and open. Millions of downloads on the app stores for entirely offline content (and ads) and no way to block the network access.
show comments
sixtyj
The issue with scrapping is the intensity and volume of bots.
I think that nobody would care if I use wget or curl for few pages, e.g. because I would like to read a site as offline or archive it.
Btw average age of any page is 10 years. Deletion or structural change after acquisition is common, Signal vs Noise site recent wipe out could serve as an example why we need to archive sites.
show comments
dang
One article mentioned in the OP was discussed here:
The comments are not showing up for me now, but when they were still showing for anonymous users, there was a link to https://commoncrawl.org. I've been sort of worried about letting agents hit websites, I wonder if a fetch_url agent tool could be made to look in common crawl first before hitting the web for it?
show comments
jappgar
I was involved in both sides of this battle over ten years ago. Things haven't changed all that much.
It's important to note that neither side has moral legitimacy. Not everyone who carries a rifle is a enemy. Not everyone wearing body armor is a saint.
I have given up on the idea that "human vs bot" matters at all when it comes to anything other than voting (which should only be done in person with paper and pen, by the way.)
You could make an argument that "likes" are a form of voting, but you shouldn't. We need to abandon the idea of supposedly democratized algorithms and focus instead on actual democracy.
I wonder how much of this is traffic caused by peoples agents using web tools causing searches and fetches rather than general trawls of the internet.
show comments
Bratmon
Residential Proxies are the most emblematic technology of our era- a group of people looked at something that used to be considered a crime (botnets) and realized that if they just did it openly, no one would ever punish them.
show comments
ArtTimeInvestor
In theory, proof of work that is used to mine a cryptocurrency could be a solution.
Bitcoin and others are already secured via massive pow computations. If we could shift that into browsers, no additional energy would be used and we could solve an issue that has been unsolved for too long: How to pay websites that provide useful information other than with ads.
The question is which resources typical consumer hardware has that large centralized compute power does not. In-browser POW to pay websites would only be possible if such a resource exists.
I am not familiar with the topic, but maybe CPU power and memory? Both seem significant in a typical consumer device.
Napkin math: If a consumer device can generate $100 per month, that would be 100/30/24/60/60=$0.00004 per second. If the user waits for 5 seconds before the first pageview, that would then make the website provider $0.0002 per visitor. Serving a million visitors per month is nowadays easily possible on a $10/month machine. So the $0.0002x1000000 = $200 would make the website a nice profit.
show comments
ValentineC
From the article:
> More recently, media-streaming devices have been identified as a major carrier of malicious scraping software. Sometimes the devices are compromised at the source; other times, they are just poorly secured and easily compromised after the fact.
I run an OPNsense firewall at home and the OpenWRT router at a hackerspace. Are there ways of auditing that devices aren't compromised? Tracking which devices still send lots of data when no one else is using the network?
show comments
arjie
What a pity. Mostly I just want personal archives of things so that I can search them much faster than commercial solutions and the like.
klamann
I think this Anubis project is a terrible solution to the problem posed by aggressive web scrapers. Using a web browser with reasonable privacy settings has become a big loss in quality of life already, but the first time I encountered Anubis I got completely locked out of most web servers that deployed it. The situation has improved a little, but I hate that maintainers of great web services have rationalized themselves into believing that creating massive barriers to access their sites is a fair trade-off. Unsurprisingly, I have nothing but negative associations with their mascot.
The FSF has the right idea about all this:
> Some web developers have started integrating a program called Anubis to decrease the amount of requests that automated systems send and therefore help the website avoid being DDoSed. The problem is that Anubis makes the website send out a free JavaScript program that acts like malware. A website using Anubis will respond to a request for a webpage with a free JavaScript program and not the page that was requested. If you run the JavaScript program sent through Anubis, it will do some useless computations on random numbers and keep one CPU entirely busy. It could take less than a second or over a minute. When it is done, it sends the computation results back to the website. The website will verify that the useless computation was done by looking at the results and only then give access to the originally requested page.
> At the FSF, we do not support this scheme because it conflicts with the principles of software freedom. The Anubis JavaScript program's calculations are the same kind of calculations done by crypto-currency mining programs. A program which does calculations that a user does not want done is a form of malware. Proprietary software is often malware, and people often run it not because they want to, but because they have been pressured into it. If we made our website use Anubis, we would be pressuring users into running malware. Even though it is free software, it is part of a scheme that is far too similar to proprietary software to be acceptable. We want users to control their own computing and to have autonomy, independence, and freedom.
Ever since bots became a problem on the internet 10-20 years ago, it has seemed like the common-sense solution is some kind of micropayment. Pay $0.01 to view the page. When money is on the line, scrapers are likely to be more well-behaved, even if they do pay. The problem is, and has always been, the friction of payment. How do you pay $0.01? The credit card processors will tack on a $6 surcharge. We need a trusted third-party that turn money into "internet article credits" that you can spend in small increments, like a video game. But I suspect that thousands of people have already though of this system, and tried it, but ran into some roadblock. I'm guessing there's some egregious regulation that makes micropayments impossible.
> There are ways to tell the difference — the bots usually do not fetch images or CSS, for example — but, by the time that determination is made, the address in question will not be used again. Blocking the address at that point is just a waste of time.
Maybe there's no point for the scanned server to block the address, but couldn't collective / shared block lists help with sites that may get scanned by the same address after the initial one?
The main problem becomes managing lists of millions of individual addresses. My (only semi-reliable these days, due to lack of time for maintenance) little project has nearly 2.3 million addresses recorded - although only 590k are from 2026, and only 38 were probes on ports 80 and 443. So maybe more manageable than I thought (but my servers don't host anything beyond personal interest to me, and access is filtered via cloudflare, which is it's own "internet control issue").
> In general, these companies range from those that aspire toward some appearance of legitimacy, advertising "GDPR compliance" for example, to others that are just overtly sleazy.
Overall, my gut feel on residential proxies is that they're an untrustworthy scourge. I'd be interested in any arguments for residential proxies by people who don't (intend to) profit from using it facilitating them.
In regards to Bright Data, one of the companies that attempts to appear legitimate, at minimum these domains should be blocked:
How much does routing traffic though residential proxies cost?
andai
>There are ways to tell the difference — the bots usually do not fetch images or CSS, for example — but, by the time that determination is made, the address in question will not be used again. Blocking the address at that point is just a waste of time.
I don't get it. Don't we keep blacklists of this stuff? And if they hammer thousands of requests per site per second and never reuse an IP, they'd run out of addresses in a few weeks.
Then they'd switch to IPv6, and... well, are we using IPv6 for anything important?
Like we need it for IoT, but do you want random IoT devices talking to your web server? (IPv4 handled mobile phones just fine not that long ago, right?)
show comments
627467
Has no one noticed their miniflux instance failing to fetch feeds because of this?
show comments
rao-v
I’m skeptical that the problem they are trying to solve is truly unreasonable bandwidth demands.
Sometimes it feels like what people want is to only serve websites and content to good normal users but not evil bad “scrapers” (because maybe maybe your content will be monetized in some nebulous way) but … you put your content up publicly on the web! That should be part of reasonable use!
EDIT: Lwn.net is perhaps not a fair target of my ire.
“There is also a desire to not impede the operation of legitimate search engines, the Internet Archive, and other such groups. Some sites may add explicit allowlists to, for example, give the dominant search engine access to the site. Such measures have the effect of further entrenching a monopoly that already serves us poorly and should be avoided. We have, thus far, succeeded in that.”
Is reasonable! Many others are not
show comments
cyanydeez
mmm, in many cases these residential proxies are media boxes, and they consent as much as anyone else consents to what amazon, or google or facebook does; it's buried somewhere in the recesses of the TOS.
The question is more about why the US and others can't properly enforce the bullshit all this amounts to.
show comments
Avery29
Google itself is a huge database.Who makes these rules depends on who's leading the market.
teravor
I find the notion that you would use residential proxies to scrape LWN somewhat laughable, I'm reading this article using a VPN.
residential proxy bandwidth isn't that cheap, I could see it be used on a reddit (though i would probably just mass register accounts to bypass their block instead).
show comments
eduction
Can BitTorrent’s architecture contribute anything useful here?
I admit this is a naive question. I have no idea how applicable bt is to web requests. This problem just seems to have a similar “too many people want this resource” shape.
show comments
zarzavat
This is a predictable consequence of age verification laws and social media bans. Formerly VPNs were a nice to have but now they are a necessity in many countries to navigate the modern internet.
The cheapest way to get a VPN (and if you're a horny and broke teenager perhaps the only way) is to trade your clean but censored IP address for an uncensored IP address in another country. You accept the bot traffic in return, or externalize it to your parents or the owner of the internet connection.
show comments
TZubiri
>We have not gone with tools like Anubis, partly because it causes annoying delays for those trying to get to the site, but also partly because it seems inevitable that the scrapers will eventually find their way around it. Indeed, there are some indications that is already happening. A proof-of-work requirement is not a huge obstacle when you have millions of other people's machines to do the work on.
The first argument that it introduces delays to users is solid, but I would advise reconsidering on the second one that a PoW workaround will be found. The moment it does you'll be able to tell because Bitcoin will crash to 0.
Will bots use infected computers to do compute to work around it? Maybe, but it requires a CPU in addition to a network reputation, 2 mechanisms are stronger than one.
show comments
zb3
> widespread scraping of web sites in search of training data for large language models and related projects
This is a good thing, thanks to this we have powerful open source LLMs.
> This activity overwhelms sites with traffic.
When LLMs get good enough, we won't need those sites anymore :)
[not satire, this is what I think, without self-censorship]
atomic128
There is a large community of people that poison scrapers.
The poison gets better every day, and the community is continuously growing. Poison Fountain, alone, transmits hundreds of gigabytes of poison per day, which goes into scrapers, git repositories on every hosting platform, social media, etc.
>types of operator running residential-proxy networks to attack web sites.
This is such a malicious interpretation. Do you think VPN operating are also trying to attack websites? Both offer the same kind of product.
>paid for hijacking their users' network connections
Nothing is being hijacked. Again the author is using wording to try and paint these people as malicious actors.
>Recently, LWN was subjected what was, by far, the heaviest scraper attack yet.
LWN is a static site. To me it seems more expensive to use Anubis than just serve the actual page.
>will now check for NetNut-infected apps
Apps are not infected with NetNut. This is just Google abusing their monopoly position to hurt its competitors.
show comments
tiahura
Again, why do we allow China on the Internet?
Backbone operators should not be allowed to knowingly maintain connections to networks that allow connections from China or Russia.
entropyneur
Sorry, I understand scraping is a problem, but talking about open Internet while simultaneously complaining you can no longer discriminate datacenter IPs like you used to is hypocrisy.
I use a datacenter-based IPv6 address because my local ISPs don't offer v6 connectivity and the Internet is already broken for me. And generally the entire idea of a "residential" IP address smells.
> ...we have tried to minimize the impact on real readers as much as possible. We have not gone with tools like Anubis, partly because it causes annoying delays for those trying to get to the site, but also partly because it seems inevitable that the scrapers will eventually find their way around it. Indeed, there are some indications that is already happening. A proof-of-work requirement is not a huge obstacle when you have millions of other people's machines to do the work on.
It's massively less annoying than a captcha, which is both a longer delay (typically, at present) and a massive cognitive distraction/roadblock.
The anubis author has stated they recognize it's an arms race, but PoW scales. Captchas and other signals are already at the end of the road; any additional difficulty increases false bot-positives, which are already unacceptably high.
For websites running dynamic languages, a binary (anubis is in go) sentry that operates before[1] the website is forced to expend any resources, is usually a large improvement over a site-hosted captcha. I would rather, and I think most humans would agree, have to wait a few seconds, maybe even closer to a minute in the future, to get a website access token good for a day or a week, than be forced to solve a captcha.
The dilemma for bots: when tokens are bound to the connecting ip, scrapers must limit the connecting IP pool for each site they want to scrape, becoming much more obvious and easy to block, or they have to use massive amounts of compute.
[1] this is true regardless of whether anubis is in reverse proxy mode or auth mode.
I feel like the solution is a better common crawl. As nice as it would be to block the frontier AI labs from getting access to information, we should reset the baseline of information accessibility so there's less marginal advantage on these labs.
I worry a lot of the anti scraping rhetoric will just injure the open web and put somebody like cloudflare in charge.
The article at the end talks about how is very easy for arbitrary apps from app stores can install a residential proxy on your phone.
10 years ago, apps had to explicitly state if they needed network access. And then the powers that be decided that really all apps need network access no matter what. And both ios and android make it hard to deny apps network access.
But really, this finally explains the hordes of really basic boring games that just advertise other boring games. Idle games and the like that really just want you to keep your phone unlocked and open. Millions of downloads on the app stores for entirely offline content (and ads) and no way to block the network access.
The issue with scrapping is the intensity and volume of bots.
I think that nobody would care if I use wget or curl for few pages, e.g. because I would like to read a site as offline or archive it.
Btw average age of any page is 10 years. Deletion or structural change after acquisition is common, Signal vs Noise site recent wipe out could serve as an example why we need to archive sites.
One article mentioned in the OP was discussed here:
Disrupting the largest residential proxy network - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46802748 - Jan 2026 (221 comments)
The comments are not showing up for me now, but when they were still showing for anonymous users, there was a link to https://commoncrawl.org. I've been sort of worried about letting agents hit websites, I wonder if a fetch_url agent tool could be made to look in common crawl first before hitting the web for it?
I was involved in both sides of this battle over ten years ago. Things haven't changed all that much.
It's important to note that neither side has moral legitimacy. Not everyone who carries a rifle is a enemy. Not everyone wearing body armor is a saint.
I have given up on the idea that "human vs bot" matters at all when it comes to anything other than voting (which should only be done in person with paper and pen, by the way.)
You could make an argument that "likes" are a form of voting, but you shouldn't. We need to abandon the idea of supposedly democratized algorithms and focus instead on actual democracy.
https://fzakaria.com/2026/07/09/who-does-anubis-actually-sto...
I wrote about this recently as well.
I wonder how much of this is traffic caused by peoples agents using web tools causing searches and fetches rather than general trawls of the internet.
Residential Proxies are the most emblematic technology of our era- a group of people looked at something that used to be considered a crime (botnets) and realized that if they just did it openly, no one would ever punish them.
In theory, proof of work that is used to mine a cryptocurrency could be a solution.
Bitcoin and others are already secured via massive pow computations. If we could shift that into browsers, no additional energy would be used and we could solve an issue that has been unsolved for too long: How to pay websites that provide useful information other than with ads.
The question is which resources typical consumer hardware has that large centralized compute power does not. In-browser POW to pay websites would only be possible if such a resource exists.
I am not familiar with the topic, but maybe CPU power and memory? Both seem significant in a typical consumer device.
Napkin math: If a consumer device can generate $100 per month, that would be 100/30/24/60/60=$0.00004 per second. If the user waits for 5 seconds before the first pageview, that would then make the website provider $0.0002 per visitor. Serving a million visitors per month is nowadays easily possible on a $10/month machine. So the $0.0002x1000000 = $200 would make the website a nice profit.
From the article:
> More recently, media-streaming devices have been identified as a major carrier of malicious scraping software. Sometimes the devices are compromised at the source; other times, they are just poorly secured and easily compromised after the fact.
I run an OPNsense firewall at home and the OpenWRT router at a hackerspace. Are there ways of auditing that devices aren't compromised? Tracking which devices still send lots of data when no one else is using the network?
What a pity. Mostly I just want personal archives of things so that I can search them much faster than commercial solutions and the like.
I think this Anubis project is a terrible solution to the problem posed by aggressive web scrapers. Using a web browser with reasonable privacy settings has become a big loss in quality of life already, but the first time I encountered Anubis I got completely locked out of most web servers that deployed it. The situation has improved a little, but I hate that maintainers of great web services have rationalized themselves into believing that creating massive barriers to access their sites is a fair trade-off. Unsurprisingly, I have nothing but negative associations with their mascot.
The FSF has the right idea about all this:
> Some web developers have started integrating a program called Anubis to decrease the amount of requests that automated systems send and therefore help the website avoid being DDoSed. The problem is that Anubis makes the website send out a free JavaScript program that acts like malware. A website using Anubis will respond to a request for a webpage with a free JavaScript program and not the page that was requested. If you run the JavaScript program sent through Anubis, it will do some useless computations on random numbers and keep one CPU entirely busy. It could take less than a second or over a minute. When it is done, it sends the computation results back to the website. The website will verify that the useless computation was done by looking at the results and only then give access to the originally requested page.
> At the FSF, we do not support this scheme because it conflicts with the principles of software freedom. The Anubis JavaScript program's calculations are the same kind of calculations done by crypto-currency mining programs. A program which does calculations that a user does not want done is a form of malware. Proprietary software is often malware, and people often run it not because they want to, but because they have been pressured into it. If we made our website use Anubis, we would be pressuring users into running malware. Even though it is free software, it is part of a scheme that is far too similar to proprietary software to be acceptable. We want users to control their own computing and to have autonomy, independence, and freedom.
https://www.fsf.org/blogs/sysadmin/our-small-team-vs-million...
Ever since bots became a problem on the internet 10-20 years ago, it has seemed like the common-sense solution is some kind of micropayment. Pay $0.01 to view the page. When money is on the line, scrapers are likely to be more well-behaved, even if they do pay. The problem is, and has always been, the friction of payment. How do you pay $0.01? The credit card processors will tack on a $6 surcharge. We need a trusted third-party that turn money into "internet article credits" that you can spend in small increments, like a video game. But I suspect that thousands of people have already though of this system, and tried it, but ran into some roadblock. I'm guessing there's some egregious regulation that makes micropayments impossible.
https://archive.fo/PAcF5
> There are ways to tell the difference — the bots usually do not fetch images or CSS, for example — but, by the time that determination is made, the address in question will not be used again. Blocking the address at that point is just a waste of time.
Maybe there's no point for the scanned server to block the address, but couldn't collective / shared block lists help with sites that may get scanned by the same address after the initial one?
The main problem becomes managing lists of millions of individual addresses. My (only semi-reliable these days, due to lack of time for maintenance) little project has nearly 2.3 million addresses recorded - although only 590k are from 2026, and only 38 were probes on ports 80 and 443. So maybe more manageable than I thought (but my servers don't host anything beyond personal interest to me, and access is filtered via cloudflare, which is it's own "internet control issue").
> In general, these companies range from those that aspire toward some appearance of legitimacy, advertising "GDPR compliance" for example, to others that are just overtly sleazy.
Overall, my gut feel on residential proxies is that they're an untrustworthy scourge. I'd be interested in any arguments for residential proxies by people who don't (intend to) profit from using it facilitating them.
In regards to Bright Data, one of the companies that attempts to appear legitimate, at minimum these domains should be blocked:
brdtnet.com
luminatinet.com
bright-sdk.com
luminati.io
As listed in this article, on HN's front page 34 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48422993 (https://blog.includesecurity.com/2026/06/the-smart-tv-in-you...)
How much does routing traffic though residential proxies cost?
>There are ways to tell the difference — the bots usually do not fetch images or CSS, for example — but, by the time that determination is made, the address in question will not be used again. Blocking the address at that point is just a waste of time.
I don't get it. Don't we keep blacklists of this stuff? And if they hammer thousands of requests per site per second and never reuse an IP, they'd run out of addresses in a few weeks.
Then they'd switch to IPv6, and... well, are we using IPv6 for anything important?
Like we need it for IoT, but do you want random IoT devices talking to your web server? (IPv4 handled mobile phones just fine not that long ago, right?)
Has no one noticed their miniflux instance failing to fetch feeds because of this?
I’m skeptical that the problem they are trying to solve is truly unreasonable bandwidth demands.
Sometimes it feels like what people want is to only serve websites and content to good normal users but not evil bad “scrapers” (because maybe maybe your content will be monetized in some nebulous way) but … you put your content up publicly on the web! That should be part of reasonable use!
EDIT: Lwn.net is perhaps not a fair target of my ire.
“There is also a desire to not impede the operation of legitimate search engines, the Internet Archive, and other such groups. Some sites may add explicit allowlists to, for example, give the dominant search engine access to the site. Such measures have the effect of further entrenching a monopoly that already serves us poorly and should be avoided. We have, thus far, succeeded in that.”
Is reasonable! Many others are not
mmm, in many cases these residential proxies are media boxes, and they consent as much as anyone else consents to what amazon, or google or facebook does; it's buried somewhere in the recesses of the TOS.
The question is more about why the US and others can't properly enforce the bullshit all this amounts to.
Google itself is a huge database.Who makes these rules depends on who's leading the market.
I find the notion that you would use residential proxies to scrape LWN somewhat laughable, I'm reading this article using a VPN.
residential proxy bandwidth isn't that cheap, I could see it be used on a reddit (though i would probably just mass register accounts to bypass their block instead).
Can BitTorrent’s architecture contribute anything useful here?
I admit this is a naive question. I have no idea how applicable bt is to web requests. This problem just seems to have a similar “too many people want this resource” shape.
This is a predictable consequence of age verification laws and social media bans. Formerly VPNs were a nice to have but now they are a necessity in many countries to navigate the modern internet.
The cheapest way to get a VPN (and if you're a horny and broke teenager perhaps the only way) is to trade your clean but censored IP address for an uncensored IP address in another country. You accept the bot traffic in return, or externalize it to your parents or the owner of the internet connection.
>We have not gone with tools like Anubis, partly because it causes annoying delays for those trying to get to the site, but also partly because it seems inevitable that the scrapers will eventually find their way around it. Indeed, there are some indications that is already happening. A proof-of-work requirement is not a huge obstacle when you have millions of other people's machines to do the work on.
The first argument that it introduces delays to users is solid, but I would advise reconsidering on the second one that a PoW workaround will be found. The moment it does you'll be able to tell because Bitcoin will crash to 0.
Will bots use infected computers to do compute to work around it? Maybe, but it requires a CPU in addition to a network reputation, 2 mechanisms are stronger than one.
> widespread scraping of web sites in search of training data for large language models and related projects
This is a good thing, thanks to this we have powerful open source LLMs.
> This activity overwhelms sites with traffic.
When LLMs get good enough, we won't need those sites anymore :)
[not satire, this is what I think, without self-censorship]
There is a large community of people that poison scrapers.
The poison gets better every day, and the community is continuously growing. Poison Fountain, alone, transmits hundreds of gigabytes of poison per day, which goes into scrapers, git repositories on every hosting platform, social media, etc.
Part of the poisoning community on Reddit, for example: https://www.reddit.com/r/PoisonFountain/comments/1uocaii/a_n...
>types of operator running residential-proxy networks to attack web sites.
This is such a malicious interpretation. Do you think VPN operating are also trying to attack websites? Both offer the same kind of product.
>paid for hijacking their users' network connections
Nothing is being hijacked. Again the author is using wording to try and paint these people as malicious actors.
>Recently, LWN was subjected what was, by far, the heaviest scraper attack yet.
LWN is a static site. To me it seems more expensive to use Anubis than just serve the actual page.
>will now check for NetNut-infected apps
Apps are not infected with NetNut. This is just Google abusing their monopoly position to hurt its competitors.
Again, why do we allow China on the Internet?
Backbone operators should not be allowed to knowingly maintain connections to networks that allow connections from China or Russia.
Sorry, I understand scraping is a problem, but talking about open Internet while simultaneously complaining you can no longer discriminate datacenter IPs like you used to is hypocrisy.
I use a datacenter-based IPv6 address because my local ISPs don't offer v6 connectivity and the Internet is already broken for me. And generally the entire idea of a "residential" IP address smells.