It’s not unconnected. Cloudflare would’ve been able to defend against the court order more aggressively had they not made the mistake previously of violating the principal of common carrier status.

Cloudflare wants to project the idea of being critical Internet infrastructure without the governance and responsibilities that go along with that.

No one wakes up at a root DNS server one day and deregisters a domain because they feel slighted by the content of that domain.