Oxylabs, the Lithuanian provider of web data extraction tools and services, has launched self-serve dedicated ISP proxies. Previously, this product was only available to enterprise customers through a sales process. 

The new product gives access to a list of IPs associated with consumer internet service providers. These IPs are static (with optional rotation functionality) and not shared with anyone else. 

The dedicated ISP proxies currently cover 14 countries across four continents. Each country includes between one and five ASNs. You’re free to choose any combination of countries and ASNs during purchase.

On January 28, 2026, Google announced its actions to disrupt IPIDEA – one of the largest residential proxy networks in the world. According to The Wall Street Journal, these measures are expected to knock over nine million devices off IPIDEA’s network.  

IPIDEA is a Chinese company that controls or is related to more than a dozen of Hong Kong incorporated brands selling proxy servers. Their non-exhaustive list includes: 360Proxy, 922Proxy, ABC Proxy, Cherry Proxy, IP2World, IPidea.io, LunaProxy, PIA S5 Proxy, PyProxy, and TabProxy. 

Google Threat Intelligence Group’s efforts involved three main measures against IPIDEA:

1. Taking legal action to take down both the public-facing domains of its brands and the domains used to control the proxy network. 
2. Sharing technical intelligence on discovered IPIDEA SDKs and proxy software with platform providers, law enforcement, and research firms. (SDKs are components installed into apps like free VPNs to recruit devices into the proxy network.) 
3. Ensuring that Google Play Protect automatically warns users and removes applications known to incorporate IPIDEA SDKs, also blocking future install attempts.

Zyte, the Ireland-based provider of web scraping tools and services, has published its 2026 Web Scraping Industry Report. 

Zyte’s whitepaper describes six key trends shaping web data collection; it overviews their impact and provides actionable recommendations for staying apace with the striding industry. 

To briefly summarize them:

1. The web scraping stack is being increasingly bundled into unified tools – APIs, making individual components like proxy servers less capable or rational to manage in-house. 
2. AI now sits across the entire scraping lifecycle, whether as LLM-based data parsers, machine learning unblocking algorithms, or code generators. 
3. End-to-end automation will become the default for web scraping pipelines: we’ll have an agent orchestrating specialized sub-agents, with humans designing rather than implementing the process.
4. Manual access strategies will become unsustainable at scale, giving way to machine learning on both sides of the equation: bots and bot detection tools. 
5. Web traffic will divide into access lanes, establishing a hostile, negotiated, or invited relationship with websites. New standards and authentication protocols will grant preferential access to select entities. 
6. Legal clarity is arriving with compliance demands in the shape of California’s Assembly Bill 2013, the EU AI Act, and other legislation. Enterprises are treating data provenance and compliance systems as increasingly important. 

On December 19, 2025, Google announced that it was suing SerpApi, a service for scraping Google Search results.

SerpApi allows AI agents, search engine optimization tools, and other companies to programmatically access the search engine at scale. According to Google, the defendant has been making hundreds of millions of search requests per day. 

Google’s claim hinges on two arguments:

1. Circumvention of SearchGuard, a protection measure implemented in January 2025. This measure reinforces Google’s prohibition of web scraping in its terms of service and the robots.txt file. Circumventing it imposes a so-called “deadweight loss” which the platform is unable to offset with ads. 
2. Copyright infringement which allegedly stems from taking licensed content from Google’s Knowledge Panel, Maps, Shopping, and other properties without authorization or payment. 

Six weeks after running Extract Summit in Austin (we cover it here), Zyte brought the web scraping conference to its home turf of Ireland. 

It would be wrong to call the Dublin edition a reprise of the first event; for the most part, it had a new line-up and focused on different areas of web data collection. As such, both events complement each other.

As always, our aim is to give you a brief (and very human) summary of the conference’s talks. Zyte has made them available on demand, so you can do some opinionated window shopping before committing to the full videos.

IPRoyal, the Lithuanian provider of proxy servers, has expanded into web scraping tools with the addition of Web Unblocker.

Web Unblocker is a middle ground between proxies and web scrapers. It integrates as a proxy server and, in addition to rotating IP addresses, undertakes to handle all roadblocks to opening websites, including anti-bot systems and dynamic page loading.

IPRoyal’s tool includes geolocation targeting up to the city level, JavaScript rendering capabilities, and the option to pass on custom headers, such as cookies. It can handle up to 200 concurrent requests.

According to the documentation, Web Unblocker currently works best with e-commerce platforms like Amazon and Shopee, websites protected by Cloudflare and standard bot protection. On the other hand, it’s unable to handle search engines, reCAPTCHA, hCAPTCHA, or interactive challenges yet. 

IPRoyal charges for successful page loads. The pricing starts at one dollar and scales to 100k requests with the public plans. Purchased requests don’t seem to expire.

Infatica, the UK, Singapore, and UAE based provider of web data infrastructure, has launched a new product – premium IPv6 residential proxies. 

The product gives access to over 500,000 IPs on the IPv6 connection protocol. It’s significantly smaller compared to Infatica’s regular residential proxy network but shares most of the same features:

• Worldwide locations
• Country, state & ZIP code level filtering
• Several rotation settings
• Credential & IP whitelist authentication

On Wednesday, October 22, Reddit initiated legal proceedings against Perplexity, an AI-powered search engine. The claim also mentions three other providers of web data: Oxylabs, SerpApi, and AWMProxy. 

Launched in a New York federal court, Reddit’s lawsuit accuses the four companies of scraping Reddit content from the Google search engine. 

Reddit’s description of the alleged transgression colorfully compares the three web scraping companies to “would-be bank robbers breaking into an armored truck carrying cash” and Perplexity to a “North Korean hacker” that hired them to steal the platform’s “manna from heaven”. 

A provided example claims that in two weeks during July 2025, the defendants scraped over three billion Google search engine pages containing Reddit text, images, videos, and URLs.