There's all kinds of things that malicious actors want to do where they value coming from an ordinary (comcast, charter, centurylink, shaw cable, whatever) residential IP.
>A Pac-Man smart TV app from Bright Data offers users the choice between viewing ads in the game or agreeing to allow their TV to serve as a residential proxy node.
I don't know how "join your users to a botnet" became some kind of legitimized monetization scheme. Ads are bad enough. What's next? "Participate in a DDOS in order to use our app?"
If there are proxy apps that only do the latter sort of work than I'm actually in favor of them existing and being widespread.
I'm surprised Comcast or some other ISP doesn't step in with a claim of tortious interference. Reselling or granting access to the ISPs services like this is almost always against the ISPs terms of service.
The consumer is in no place to consent to this exchange.
At the very least, consumer connections explicitly disallow "Commercial Use". That means that you can't use them to run a business. You can't use them to turn a profit. You can't use them to generate revenue. That means no running servers, and that means no "reselling 2% of your bandwidth" for a few pennies because some Euro-Trash-Stranger wants to borrow it!
And that's really bad! Far more than reselling, you should very much be able to run a website from home!
No, it’s fair, and probably federally regulated.
You wanna run a business? Then get a business license, pay your business taxes, and sign up for a business Internet connection. That’s what they’re made for. Then run your servers to your heart’s content.