Am I the only one cynically thinking that "Russia, Iran, DPRK, PRC, etc" is the "But think of the chiiildren!!!" excuse for doing this?

And when Google say

"IPIDEA’s proxy infrastructure is a little-known component of the digital ecosystem leveraged by a wide array of bad actors."

What they really mean is " ... leveraged by actors indiscriminately scraping the web and ignoring copyright - that are not us."

I can't help but feel this is just Google trying to pull the ladder up behind then and make it more difficult for other companies to collect training data.