Safe harbor provisions are for this exact scenario, we must depend on that not corp scale to maintain reasonable governing. Safe harbor has come under attack lately, unfairly so IMO.

The safe harbor has to do with moderation policy.

The historical purpose of safe harbor was to allow AOL to have a walled garden without become responsible for all the illegal content that snuck past.

IANAL, but DMCA safe harbor doesn’t really apply to a companies like CloudFlare, nor is it needed, because they are not moderating UGC on a publishing platform, they are a routing optimization utility.

Not sure where you saw that the DMCA safe harbor provisions apply to moderation policy; It has everything to do with Copyright and removal of copyrighted material; nothing to do with moderation of UGC. It is directly in the name "Digital Millenium Copyright Act".

Content moderation is covered by the CDA section 230; completely separate from the DMCA

And it 100% should apply to Cloudflare as well; if they're caching copyrighted material they need to respond to takedown requests or lose that safe harbor protection. Just as it applies to Google for indexing alleged copyright material; if you've ever seen that "links removed due to DMCA takedown notices" in search results, even when they are not hosting said content.

IANAL also, and I don't know how much DMCA stuff is handled cross borders (I do believe some DMCA provisions are applicable thru trade treaties and the like, but not sure); and I do think DMCA takedowns are rife with abuse; but content moderation really has nothing to do with it..

It's not hiding behind that fact. It just is a fact.

I'm directly replying to:

  Which is exactly what Cloudflare wants and has planned all along.

The idea that it's all planned and was a strategic bid to get into a stable business position and so on...

They've planned all along to mix bad hosting with good hosting to make any attempts to block them, legal or personal, cause plenty of collateral damage.

So to avoid this, how should they have done things differently?

Maybe they should have confined "bad" hosting to some IPs and disseminated this to countries directly?

P.S.: I'm not serious, of course.

RFC 3514 would be helpful here.

Ah, yes. That’s a much more elegant way.

This is literally the business model. The owner of an IP address is responsible for the content delivered from that IP address. Cloudflare would like to have it both ways -- they get to multiplex sites behind their network infrastructure and accept money for the service, but not be responsible for the content that they deliver, because it originally came from somewhere else.

> The owner of an IP address is responsible for the content delivered from that IP address

Nope, you are totally wrong; they are immune by US law.

AFAIK, CloudFlare removed only a handful of sites, but protected 100s - 1000s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230

In case the use of "literally" wasn't enough of a clue, this is incorrect. For the same reason that the DNS service, the ISP, or the internet itself are not responsible for the content.