Cloudflare serves up illegal content, let's say a phishing site.
Cloudflare refuses to stop serving the phishing site.
Cloudflare refuses to disclose who they are serving the site for.
By using your metaphor, the county would not even send out the sheriff to prevent a shipment from illegal material being driven over their highway once they were aware of it and would just flat out refuse to cooperate with state police.
It's not up to Cloudflare to decide what content is or isn't illegal. But Cloudflare actively prevents investigations to even start determining whether or not something is illegal.
You name cloudflare and a provider of the phishing site in a lawsuit. It makes it through courts. Cloudflare is unlikely to attempt to defend it. Your attorneys figure out how as a part of the redress get an order for cloudflare to disconnect the phishing site. You hire appropriate parties to service Cloudflare. Cloudflare disconnect the phishing site.
That's exactly how it is supposed to work.
Except CloudFlare refuses to name such an entity. All they're willing to do is forward my complaint to the "provider of the phishing site".
So they're willing to violate my privacy and put me in danger by possibly forwarding my details to possible criminals, but they refuse to do anything about the actual problem.
They say they will
> put a warning page up for when visitors try to access the specific link. We will also notify the site owner to have them clean the malicious files on their site. [0]
but that's a flat out lie. I've tried this avenue numerous times.
I shouldn't have to go to court for what is basic network hygiene.
What you're advocating is like having google, disable their spamfilter and me then having to sue every single spammer that sends me spam mail.
[0] https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200167736-H...
I'm not saying the same thing about routers.
Cloudflare is not operating routers that make the internet work. They act in the interest of their clients, not the internet in general.