I think the very fact that they IP ban you from their Captcha service proves that Google’s intention was never to actually provide effective Captcha services and “make the web more secure” or any of their marketing BS. Their intention is to have a plausible front for datamining you, nothing more. They directly claim that the reason they ban you is because your automated queries supposely harm their servers (not even some excuse like “oh we’re doing this to protect the poor itty bitty website that use our Captcha and therefore we have a sorn duty to protect,” they straight up admit it’s about them), but think about it, who exactly can DDOS Google? You would especially not be able to do it from a VPN or a Tor node, those are super bandwidth limited, especially the latter. And if you were trying to DDOS Google, you’d be flooding them with inbound UDP data, not loading their captcha service, so banning you from that is only because many automated queries dilute the data they’re trying to collect on humans. Also, in almost all of those cases, you’re IP banned from the captcha, but not google.com or their ads, wouldn’t those be a higher priority if your goal really was to protect yourself? Also also, pretty ironic that Google has a problem with your automated queries when their entire business is automated queries of the entire web, and has been caught ignoring robots.txt rules multiple times.