Residential Proxies and the AI Scraper Problem
In brief: Residential proxies and AI scrapers are not merely a traffic-growth problem. They shift the costs of competition for training data onto other people’s devices and independent websites. What happened On July 10, 2026, LWN reported that large-scale scraper traffic routed through residential proxies had intensified again. The concern is not clearly identified automated access, such as search-engine crawlers. It is traffic that appears briefly from vast numbers of home and mobile-network IP addresses, makes only a few requests from each address, and disappears. ...