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>The reason? Advertising.

Or the ability to accurately direct users to the nearest POP.

Yes, for people who don't know, this is how many things like directing users to a closer TLS endpoint for HTTP such that the overall connection suffers less latency.

Isn't anycast ip usually used for that instead?

It entirely depends, anycast is great for getting a request to the closest DNS endpoint via routing weight rules.

After that, there are many options. But the GP was specifically mentioning a valid use case where this is applicable and not shady.

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