[bransonf]

That’s pretty much exactly the point. On the consumer facing side there is the VPN market, which people use to access content in remote locations or obfuscate their traffic to prevent surveillance/fingerprinting.

On the business side, there’s a real need to be able to scrape say LinkedIn or Amazon, which necessitates rotating IPs to avoid getting blocked. The legal precedent currently incentivizes this sort of behavior between both parties.

Mentioned also, however, is that criminals can use the technology to advance fraud.

[cbsks]

So instead of the scraper’s IP being banned, it’s mine? That’s not good.

[shmoogy]

The idea is usually to use hundreds or thousands of IPs, avoiding (ideally) detection, and not having any banned. Obviously if hundreds of people are using the same blocks, it doesn't quite work like that.

The real user/owner would get a captcha and be fine for most big sites.

*not sticking up for any of these companies, but I have required residential proxies in the past to scrape Google PLAs.