That's not because of surveillance. Reuters and many other sites are trying to stop their content from being scraped by AI companies.
Typically they put limits on total content downloaded per IP address. AI companies end up hitting those limits quickly. So they rent VPNs to try to get access to more.
Big companies can buy tons of ip addresses. They don't use commercial VPN. The only way they know you are using a VPN is using lists of public VPNs. They are not our friends
That is not as easy as you think it is. IP address space is relatively cheap per IP address. But it is much more expensive per IP address prefix, which is how the filtering actually works.
Hence why these companies use VPNs to rent diverse IP address space.
Do they filter by prefix to stop geographic areas? I did block some Amazon scanning on an e commerce but taking down few ip's was enough to stop the waste of resources.
I tested about the VPN's and they just have updated lists of common VPN addresses. Using a custom VPN make them unable to filter so there shouldn't be any other sign that tells the server who's using the VPN. Perhaps a discrepancy about DNS servers use or some other leaks.
