Cloudflare realizes that the status quo makes it hard to prove standing to sue, and that's a large part of what allows them to get away with it. But if you go to Google right now and search (https://www.google.com/#q=ddos+booter), you will find that basically all of them are behind Cloudflare. They have spent an enormous amount of time brainwashing Silicon Valley into thinking that this is a free speech argument (as evidenced by some of the absolutely ridiculous comments in here comparing DDoS attackers to unpopular speech protection or making absolutely shameless comparisons to whistleblowers like Aaron Swartz).

DDoS-for-sale sites are not "free speech sites", they are for-profit criminal organizations engaging in the violent censorship of people that are too poor to afford proper DDoS mitigation or that want to control the privacy of their users by managing the SSL certs.

The booters aren't usually as powerful as these 600Gbps+ monsters, but they're quite adequate to wreck almost any network for a long time (most IP transit hookups for racks are 10Gbps or less, these attacks can be well in excess of 100Gbps), requiring you to spend exorbitant amounts of money to protect your site against what are essentially bored high schoolers with a spare $20, your competitors, or whomever. That money is then dumped back into the system, allowing the attackers to build even more sophisticated and powerful infrastructure, leading to worse attacks like the ones we're now starting to see. Krebs was one of the people to document this trend, and now his site has been censored off the net by the same people he was writing about. Why is it so surprising to everyone that he's avoiding Cloudflare?

< . But if you go to Google right now and search (https://www.google.com/#q=ddos+booter), you will find that basically all of them are behind Cloudflare.

Search Google? So should Google be delisting these sites?

If you're getting DDoS'd right now, and you want to sue the booter that is doing it, how would you know which one to sue? Cloudflare obscures the origin IP because it's a reverse proxy. But even if you know the origin IP, that's not the IP the DDoS is going to be coming from. So how does one match up an attack with a specific booter website?

As I just mentioned, Cloudflare realizes that the status quo makes it hard to prove standing to sue them or to go after the attackers, and that's a large part of what allows them to get away with it. How is the FBI supposed to conduct an investigation here? They're not going to be able to get subpoenas for every single DDoS booter behind Cloudflare (one group has documented over 200 of them).

I recognize that it's impossible to eradicate the problem 100%, but by driving it underground, you can dramatically reduce the amount of it by making it harder for them to conduct their business. Cloudflare could do this in a day if they wanted to, instead they sit behind a "free speech" argument waiting for someone to force them to cut it out. Don't say I didn't warn you if the government comes in to change the liability laws to prevent this sort of behavior in the future. Nobody's going to defend DDoS spam packets from criminal botnets as "free speech" when they're preventing all speech from occurring.