> How does Bright Data acquire its residential IPs?
> Bright Data has built a unique consumer IP model by which all involved parties are fairly compensated for their voluntary participation. App owners install a unique Software Development Kit (SDK) to their applications and receive monthly remuneration based on the number of users who opt-in. App users can voluntarily opt-in and are compensated through an ad-free user experience or enjoy an upgraded version of the app they are using for free. These consumers or ‘peers’ serve as the basis of our network and can opt-out at any time. This model has brought into existence an unrivaled, first of its kind, ethically sound, and compliant network of real consumers.
I don't know how they can say with a straight face that this is 'ethically sound'. They have, essentially, created a botnet, but apparently because it's "AdTech" and the user "opts-in" (read: they click on random buttons until they hit one that makes the banner/ad go away) it's suddenly not malware.
NordVPN (Tesonet) has another business doing the same thing. They sell the IP addresses/bandwidth of their NordVPN customers to anyone who needs bulk mobile or residential IP addresses. That's right, installing their VPN software adds your IP address to a pool that NordVPN then resells. Xfinity/Comcast sort of pioneered this with their wifi routers that automatically expose an isolated wifi network called 'xfinity' (IIRC) whether you agree or not.
The Comcast access points do, at least, have the saving grace that they're on a separate network segment from the customer's hardware, and don't share an IP address or bandwidth/traffic limit with the customer.
Tesonet and other similar services (e.g. Luminati) don't have that. As far as anyone -- including web services, the ISP, or law enforcement -- are concerned, their traffic is the subscriber's traffic.
Scrapers have a limited range of IPs, so rate-limiting them and stalling (or dropping) request responses is one way to deal with the DoS scenario.
For my sites, I have placed the majority behind HTTP Basic Auth...