Are ISPs responsible for bots having residential IPs or is this a user problem? (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 weeks ago by Maroon@lemmy.world to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

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I'm trying to understand the bot problem in the internet and finding more ways to defend myself. One thing that I can't seem to understand is why most bots, scrapers and crawlers seem to have residential IPs.

Is it that ISPs are being paid by tech-bros to assign them these IPs?
Is it that residential devices have been hacked /contain malware that does this?
Is it trivial for companies to assign themselves residential IPs?
Paid volunteers are doing this for AI companies?

Or is there is some other reason for this?

Obviously this is a problem because one can rotate / cycle through residential IPs and if I aggressively block each offender in my logs permanently, then the next person assigned this IP who may be a legitimate user will be unable to access my site.

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[-] justme@lemmy.dbzer0.com 20 points 2 weeks ago

I remember just recently a post about a "smart" washing machine creating over 3GB of Internet traffic per day.

[-] village604@adultswim.fan 6 points 2 weeks ago

Iirc that was a math error on the poster's part.

this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2026

55 points (92.3% liked)

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