Comment by tim_at_ping

Comment by tim_at_ping 2 months ago

Not at all. Firstly, just from a legal standpoint, the AUPs aren't signed by us; they're signed by the customer and as long as they understand what they're doing through us ensuring we get informed consent, then its their responsibility and judgement on whether they want to break the rules.

On to the ethics of it, again I find it pretty hard to side with ISPs here since the only reason they don't want this activity on their network is because they don't want the additional bandwidth flowing through their fiber and personally, I believe if you buy a 100mb or a 1G internet line from a carrier then it should be yours to use as you wish as long as it remains within the law. This is compounded by the fact that carriers themselves seem to have a tendency to disregard user / privacy agreements and have been happy to sell metadata and location information to any data brokers without ever checking with their customers whether its okay or not.

This is obviously the opinion of someone who has a stake in the game but when it comes to web-scraping, VPN usage, proxies and internet usage in general I tend to find myself believing in a free and open web with any blocks, restrictions or censorship usually being a bad thing.

greyface- 2 months ago

> from a legal standpoint, the AUPs aren't signed by us; they're signed by the customer and as long as they understand what they're doing through us ensuring we get informed consent, then its their responsibility

Have you consulted legal counsel about this? What you're describing sounds like tortious interference.

> only reason they don't want this activity on their network is because they don't want the additional bandwidth flowing through their fiber

As someone who has a stake in a small ISP: this is not true. I don't want you trashing the reputation of my IPs and getting them banned from the services your customers are scraping. Replacing those IPs comes at a significant cost ($8000-9000 per /24).

Reply View 1 reply

tim_at_ping 2 months ago

You've definitely got an interesting view point and I appreciate your take as a stakeholder.
To address the first point, I had to look up tortious interference haha but after seeing the main elements, I don't think we'd be close to meeting that threshold. Mainly because:
1. Offering a service which is then engaged with by a end user != Convincing/Interrupting/Interfering 2. We don't ever know the internet contracts they've signed + I actually don't know whether AUP prohibit this kind of activity (I don't think its common, at least in the UK, from my knowledge) 3. I think most ISPs would be hard stretched to provide any material damage
To your second point, since you're a smaller ISP I can understand your position somewhat and my original post was more to do with the big players; we have a lot of experience with large ISPs and they tend to be happy to lease IP space / IP transit if the price is right.
As someone that knows the space very well, I also think the risks here are pretty overstated and subnet bans are incredibly rare and usually caused by activity en masse across an entire block. The likelihood that every single one / or most of your customers would be web-scraping with their IP address is pretty much zero. I guess the effect of activity also depends a lot on what activity it is and how the network is ran - we're very strict on the traffic that can go through the network and everything high-risk is blocked i.e government, edu, banking and extra-extra-bad stuff to avoid issues; I concede that if the company running the network is allowing mailing and everything else under the sun it would have a larger effect on stakeholders such as yourself but I think to broadly say web-scraping on a small portion of IPs on an AS ends in the ISP having to purchase new prefixes is a stretch and hypothetical. If you do actually have experience and have had to purchase new subnets in the past because of this stuff then I'd definitely be interested to hear more (tim@pingproxies.com) and I'd be happy to remove any IPs from your AS if they're present in our network.
Cheers, Tim at Ping

Reply View | 0 replies