But if there are so many individuals or companies with distasteful views surely there would be enough of a demand to warrant someone setting up another company to serve them.

It is not possible due to bureaucracy inherent in the design of the internet. It is like starting your own email provider- you need people to peer with you in order to make your infrastructure useful. If you set up your own email provider and gmail marks your emails as spam, then no one will use your email provider and you go out of business. Likewise, if you set up your internet infrastructure and no one peers with you, no one outside your network will be able to connect to your clients.

Because the internet is broken and has no real defense against spam or DDoS, the only way to have load balancing is to have a big intermediary with a lot of bandwidth sit between all the traffic and discriminate. These spam prevention systems are trivial to bypass for those with the right political connections, this is why the internet is persistently weak. In order to stay online, you need to manage a political relationship with the gatekeepers like CF.

The end game is that the capital-I "Internet" is fractured into separate autonomous systems (AS) as negotiations between them break down. This is basically the ultimate goal of chinese and russian internet censorship. This is why firewall-punching software like tor is important for freedom of speech: the alternative is the complete balkanization of the network.

There is no real alternative to ICANN's DNS root. What are you going to do? tell people to use openNIC? Fat chance. Most people are not even aware of such a thing, let alone the existence of DNS itself. In order to have a domain name with ICANN, you must have a registrar who is on good terms with ICANN and pays the racketeering fee upstream to them. I am confident that there is no domain registrar other than CF that would be willing to hold KF's domain name.

The only real option is to convince people to use a reverse-compatible system like Tor that breaks up these peering relationships and does away with racketeering schemes like DNS/PKI that sit on the wrong side of zooko triangle.

CF exists because of multiple rounds of huge funding -- it's useful and huge now, but it wasn't the type of company that spun up organically from a quality and voluminous customer base.

also, mysteriously, when they were trying to secure funding and gain traction they stayed apolitical; funny how that works.

good luck going around and asking for money to build a cloudflare like service whose customer base are heavily political, nuanced, and un-profitable, hated & violent.

I'm sure the rich are going to race to their checkbooks to fund that project!

So it sounds like CF did a good thing by canceling their service.