That said, I support Google working to shut these networks down, since they are almost universally bad.
It’s just a shame that there’s no where to go for legitimate crawling activities.
Think about why that might be. I'm sorry, if you legitimately need to crawl the net, and do so from a cloud provide, your industry screwed you over with bad behaviour. Go get hosting with a company that cares about who their customers are, you're hanging out with a bad crowd.
This differs obviously, but having an ASN in our case means that we can deal you, contact you and assume that you're better than random bot number 817.
I actually do let quite a few known, "good" scrapers scrape my stuff. They identify themselves, they make it clear what they do, and they respect conventions like robots.txt.
These residential proxies have been abused by scrapers that use random legit-looking user agents and absolutely hammer websites. What is it with these scrapers just not understanding consent? It's gross.
There are lots of healthy / productive businesses in the cloud and lots of scumbags, just like any enterprise.
I still have no idea about your point, by the way.
Hiding behind a residential proxy and using random user agents? Gross. Learn what consent is.
You're thinking about the case of big AI companies crawling your blog. I'm talking about a small startup trying to do traditional indexing and needing to run from residential proxy to make it work.