But then would you make the same arguments for running a tor node (presumably, you don't know what shady stuff is there, but you know there's shady stuff)?

You could say the same about google’s terms of service.

Why would the users care either way?

>I can't help but feel this is just Google trying to pull the ladder up behind then and make it more difficult for other companies to collect training data.

I can very easily see this as being Google's reasoning for these actions, but let's not pretend that clandestine residential proxies aren't used for nefarious things. The vast majority of social media networks will ban - or more generally and insiously - shadow ban accounts/IPs that use known proxy IPs. This means that they are gating access to their platforms behind residential IPs (on top of their other various blackboxes and heuristics like fingerprinting). Operators of bot networks thus rely on residential proxy services to engage in their work, which ranges from mundane things like engagement farming to outright dangerous things like political astroturfing, sentiment manipulation, and propaganda dissemination.

LLMs and generative image and video models have made the creation of biased and convincing content trivial and cheap, if not free. The days of "troll farms" is over, and now the greatest expense for a bad actor wishing to influence the world with fake engagement and biased opinions is their access to platforms, which means accounts and internet connections that aren't blacklisted or shadow banned. Account maturity and reputation farming is also feeling a massive boon due to these tools, but as an independent market it also similarly requires internet connections that aren't blacklisted or shadow banned. Residential proxies are the bottleneck for the vast majority of bad actors.

> Am I the only one cynically thinking that "Russia, Iran, DPRK, PRC, etc" is the "But think of the chiiildren!!!" excuse for doing this?

Maybe. But until I dropped all traffic from pretty much every mobile network provider in Russia and Israel, I'd get up every morning to a couple of thousand new users of whom a couple of hundred had consistently within a few hundred milliseconds created an account, clicked on the activation link, and then posted a bunch of messages in every forum category spreading hate speech.

No, what they're saying is what they said, what you're implying reveals a strange bias. Web scraping through residential proxies? Please think through your thoughts more. There's much more effective and efficient ways to do so. Multiple bad actors, like ransomware affiliates, have been caught using residential proxy networks. But by all means, don't let facts and cyber threat intelligence get in the way.

Also, as a website owner, these residential proxies are a real pain. Tons and tons of abusive traffic, including people trying to exploit vulnerabilities and patently broken crawlers that send insane numbers of requests, and no real way to block it.

It's just nasty stuff. Intent matters, and if you're selling a service that's used only by the bad guys, you're a bad guy too. This is not some dual-use, maybe-we-should-accept-the-risks deal that you have with Tor.

If they're lucky. Sometimes people have their doors kicked in by armed police.

Spam in Google search results is due to Google happily taking money from the spammers in exchange for promoting their spam, or that the spam sites benefit Google indirectly by embedding Google Ads/Analytics.

I don't see any spam in Kagi, so clearly there is a way to detect and filter it out. Google is simply not doing so because it would cut into their profits.