Except it's absolutely up to the whims of private businesses, if you want to be consistent with how businesses are understood in the US. In the US corporations

Except it's absolutely up to the whims of private businesses, if you want to be consistent with how businesses are understood in the US. In the US corporations are people and money is speech. Cloudflare can try to become a public utility if they want but right now they're a corporation and they're making a political decision to continue to take money from customers that use their services to operate harmful social spaces that are used to coordinate targeted harassment campaigns and drive vulnerable people into suicide. They frame selling DDoS protection as a neutral and good thing because it prevents cybercrime. But would you accept the same argument for selling ballistic vests? Plate carriers? APCs? Clearly selling defensive equipment to both sides of a conflict is still involving yourself in a conflict. If you want to be neutral, you don't involve yourself, you don't sell. And to make matters worse, the general consensus is that the party they're selling DDoS protection to are "the bad guys" in this conflict. The guy operating it literally had to create his own hosting company because he ran out of hosting providers willing to do business with him. He had to resort to crypto wallets because payment providers have long banned his site. Even if there wouldn't be any evidence that he encourages and participates in the harassment campaigns his site is known for (a site, by the way, that was literally created to harass one specific individual), the person maintaining that site still took a principled stand to allow this behavior to continue despite what it cost him. And now Cloudflare's CEO took the same stand to continue doing business with this person.