We’ve been experiencing the same thing. On further inspection, we discovered that the owner of the data centers was Tencent. So we blocked them at the ASN level across countries.
This was after web had to geo block China & Singapore some weeks earlier.
These AI scraping guys are destroying the web for normal folks in these countries where they run data scrapers.
Did they really have to geo-block entire countries? I think the blocks of unrelated users is what's really affecting normal folks and that's the choice of operators.
It's like if you had incidents with a few violent drunk Brovanians in your town, then saying it's those few peoples fault that Brovanians are now being discriminated against and are being banned from entering shops just because they come from the same place as the vandals.
Site operators arbitrarily blocking entire countries due to a few botters (albeit with a lot of bots) causing issues aren't without responsibility in the loss of an open web.
You have a choice in how to respond and where to draw lines. We can't just throw up our hands and blame the botters.
This was after web had to geo block China & Singapore some weeks earlier.
These AI scraping guys are destroying the web for normal folks in these countries where they run data scrapers.