It’s been this from the very beginning. But they don’t fit the definition of a protection racket as they’re not the ones attacking you if you don’t pay up. So they’re more like a security company that has no competitors due to the needed investment to operate.
Cloudflare are notorious for shielding cybercrime sites. You can’t even complain about abuse of Cloudflare about them, they’ll just forward on your abuse complaint to the likely dodgy host of the cybercrime site. They don’t even have a channel to complain to them about network abuse of their DNS services.
So they certainly are an enabler of the cybercriminals they purport to protect people from.
Any internet service provider needs to be completely neutral. Not only in their actions, but also in their liability.
Same goes for other services like payment processors.
If companies that provide content-agnostic services are allowed to policy the content, that opens the door to really nasty stuff.
You can’t chop everyone’s arms to stop a few people from stealing.
If they think their services are being used in a reprehensible manner, what they need to do is alert the authorities, not act like vigilantes.
It’s been this from the very beginning. But they don’t fit the definition of a protection racket as they’re not the ones attacking you if you don’t pay up. So they’re more like a security company that has no competitors due to the needed investment to operate.
Cloudflare are notorious for shielding cybercrime sites. You can’t even complain about abuse of Cloudflare about them, they’ll just forward on your abuse complaint to the likely dodgy host of the cybercrime site. They don’t even have a channel to complain to them about network abuse of their DNS services.
So they certainly are an enabler of the cybercriminals they purport to protect people from.
Any internet service provider needs to be completely neutral. Not only in their actions, but also in their liability.
Same goes for other services like payment processors.
If companies that provide content-agnostic services are allowed to policy the content, that opens the door to really nasty stuff.
You can’t chop everyone’s arms to stop a few people from stealing.
If they think their services are being used in a reprehensible manner, what they need to do is alert the authorities, not act like vigilantes.
If they acted differently, they’d probably be liable for illegal activity that they proxy for (this is for example relevant for the DMCA safe harbor).
Anyhow, when on their abuse page, I have an option for “Registrar”, which is used for “DNS abuse”, among others.