Cloudflare starts blocking pirate sites for UK users

Classic mafia racket economics would claim that Cloudflare themselves created the botnet ddos problem so that they themselves could solve it, and now they have the power to do this, especially when governments ask them very sternly to do so.

Being that botnet DDOS existed before CF that's a pretty strong statement.

botnets are usually coming from residential networks due to infected hosts/IoT devices.

if cloudflare were to host malware on their own IPs, it would have been trivial to see CF's steps.

Unless you want to suggest that CF is developing and distributing sophisticated malware and making botnets across the world

They existed before, but websites selling DDoS as a service were easier to track down and competitors would DDoS eachother. Cloudflare provided a strong layer of protection for everyone, including these DDoS websites, and took no action to take them down when reported

Though certain mafia economics would suggest exactly that, I personally am not suggesting it. It's just an extremely interesting possibility that could only be proven with evidence.

Classic NSA tactics would be to setup a giant American Man-In-The-Middle company that most of the traffic of the world passes through.

And classic Washington Consensus tactics would be to manufacture a fake enemy to demonize in the media, such as Non-Western botnet makers