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Comment by immibis | Hacker News Reader

Hell for hosting, but if you're doing adversarial interoperability as a client, it does help you avoid being IP-banned. (At least in Western countries. I hear that Africa and Latin America tend to just get their CGNAT gateways banned because site operators don't give a shit about whether users from those regions can use their sites)

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The client feature only works for websites that care about making exceptions for CGNAT users. Plenty of them simply ban the shared addresses.

That's part of the reason why countries like India are getting so many CAPTCHAs: websites don't care for the reason behind lackluster IP plans from CGNAT ISPs. If the ISP offered IPv6 support, people wouldn't have so many issues, but alas, apparently there's money for shitty CGNAT boxes but not IPv6 routers.

> it does help you avoid being IP-banned

Actually all it does is get everyone behind the CGNAT banned. I've lost access to the WSJ and NYT recently, and other websites over time. For every Cloudflare backed website, I have to pass a captcha on every access.

Fuck those people doing "adversarial interoperability as a client", AI scraping, et al, who take away from thousands of people for profit, then move on to the next pool of victims.

YouTube showed me a "this household watches suspiciously many videos" once when the provider moved us behind a CGNAT (because 100 households were suddenly watching from the same address, not just one).

It also messes a bit with geolocation, we frequently teleport to different places within the country.

Yeah, but in this case, the negotiation between the ISP and YouTube typically ends with the IP being unblocked. It's not like when one household is actually watching as much as 100 people, when the IP stays blocked.

Not quite. I'm in the UK and some of our customers get blocked by overzealous CDNs and they're all on CGNAT.

It's not really overzealous since not banning the CGNAT IPs just gives the abusers safe harbor.

And banning them makes an entire country unable to use your site. That might be tolerable (to the site owner, but not in general) if the country is Argentina. Not if the site is France. Which is why Argentina gets blocked a lot more than France and if you want to scrape things you'd do better on a CGNAT network in France.

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