[bransonf]

I certainly am not going to defend the whole market. I’m aware of many issues.

But, there is a strict business need for these proxies. If you plan to fight giants, the first thing you need is their data. And you can’t get it without proxies.

Sure, that’s another subject for debate; whether scraping/crawling is ethical itself.

[walrus01]

Unfortunately it's not just scraping, they're also often used for outright fraud. Various online payment payment processors' fraud detection systems can be circumvented partially by appearing as a legit residential end user on a comcast cable connection, for instance. Or lots of other fraudulent activities where you have a click worker in a cube farm in a low labor cost location, using the proxy, pretending to be an end user in the usa.