They should block their own crooked customers because the alternative of being belligerent with the authorities will deal exactly to the outcome they're whining about: the only option available is to block IPs leading to their more legit customers being caught in the blast radius. That should, ultimately, lead to the legit sites taking their business elsewhere.

As for doing legal content blocks based on geo-location, that is not a can of worms. It's table stakes, and I find it hard to believe they wouldn't already have that capability.

> Why would they block their own customers?

Because their customers are breaking the law? I agree that there's an issue with how to handle jurisdiction, but you can hardly ignore a court and then get mad when they take action against you.

Just because someone is setting up blocking does not mean that a law has been broken.

Blocking is often used as an easy alternative to prove in courts that laws has been broken.

For example considering the list mentioned in the article (and I do not know which ones affected cloudflare): http://netzsperre.liwest.at/

Why should a US company censor a Russian website (rt.com) because it is on a Austrian list because of a EU regulation? Austrian citizens reading rt.com are not breaking the law.

And I better add, that I am not claiming that the content of those sites are trustworthy, but I do feel insulted that they do not trust me to read if I want to.