Dude, you're making this way more confusing then it has to be. You are right in thinking that it could be considered a middle man however. Think of it this way, your at work... they don't want you looking at porn, active directory forces the networked users to pass through x.x.x.x proxy server. So now when you go to the net, you're authenticating to the proxy, its saying ok you're good to go, depending on the server it does a many-to-one translation and pushes you out on the public side of the network. All the while blocking and only allowing you to see what it wants. People commonly use anonymous free proxies to spoof their true IP on the net, I suppose it makes them feel like they're in the NSA and high tech or something. Lastly, no... you're not using that servers particular 'bandwidth' so to speak.... you have your cap on your connection as does this server, wherever it may reside. You are using a portion of the bandwidth while it processes your requests, but would never be 'inheriting it's speed'.