If cloudflare is providing services to illegal websites, they very much are in full control of the situation. They knowingly choose to keep hosting that content, and have legal customers exposed to that risk.
You may like that the platform is open by default to everybody, but that's the obvious consequence.
Are blocking unlawful? I don't think so. Their country their rules.
Business-wise it's risky to deliver your service from IPs that also serves dirty content. Technical solutions exists, even if you want to stay on Cloudflare.
But it also highlights the fact that the idea of blocking “dirty IPs” is at best a blunt instrument. Every ISP has abusers. Some are worse than others at self-policing their customers. Cloudflare is reputable and better than most. Given the huge breadth of sites sitting behind Cloudflare, it’s crazy, IMO, to block all of Cloudflare.
It does not block all of cloudflare, it blocks their shared IPs.
If you are doing serious business you may not want to do it on IPs that are also used for shady content.
IP reputation is a well known strategy, used by emails and other firewalls.
Okay, so they aren’t blocking whole ranges. Yea, you definitely don’t want to share an IP with a spammer or malware site. I thought they were blocking whole ranges.
In other countries, like Italy, they made a system where domain names are fast-tracked for blocking within minutes. I hate to say it but Spain managed to do something even worse.
Cloudflare is a private company, they might (unwillingly) benefit from hosting illegal services. They don't implement a quick or proactive process to take down content that is obviously illegal. The money made by illegal streaming websites doesn't end in good pockets, which raises further concerns. Such streaming is quickly spawn for the event, then disappear. Even if you fight them legally after the event, they operate from countries that won't cooperate.
Cloudflare could change their policy to take down quickly obvious abuse during live events. They could proactively check new customers before allowing public traffic.
People can vote against protecting property if they think it creates unreasonable effects.
Not sure where you got your stats but top website owners can easily deploy technical solutions to this issue.
We live in a complex word. This problem is not completely manufactured by bad people at sports and television companies. What should right owners do? Accept that content they own is streamed illegally, for profit, and not use recourses the law provides?
You may like that the platform is open by default to everybody, but that's the obvious consequence.