A protection racket implies collusion between attacker and defender, where the defender comes to you offering “protection”, but then comes again as an attacker to those who refuse. CloudFlare aren’t a protection racket; they’re just an ordinary for-hire private security service, for businesses in “bad parts of town.” They don’t come to anyone; people come to them. And they have any facility for originating outbound requests from any of the sites they’re protecting, so they can’t be used to facilitate an attack, either. (Any more than you’d say that the private security firm hired to guard a mob hideout “facilitated the attack” when the mob leaves their hideout under the firm’s care to go attack people elsewhere.)
> procedures to get nation states that are a clear and consistent threat to everyone else off the Internet
This is the thing: cutting off diplomatic routes is almost never the right approach, even during a hot war. Even when someone is punching you in the face, you don’t want to tape their mouth and ears shut that they could be using to negotiate no-longer-punching-you-in-the-face.
The Internet is like the Olympics: it provides a way for the common people of different countries to see each-other’s good works and learn to respect one-another; even as the leaders of those countries, and asshole minorities within those countries, are making the news and fanning hawkish sentiment. Throwing out the counterbalance in such a scenario is something you’d expect an Emperor Palpatine figure to do, to engineer a war.
Tangent: the biggest tragedy of the modern era is that the US, Russia, and China have entirely-separate popular social networks and blogging/vlogging platforms. The rare Russian YouTuber (living outside of Russia) talking to an English-speaking audience about their real feelings toward the Russian government does so much to build bridges between countries; but there would be a ton more of them if YouTube and VK had a federated video sharing arrangement, the way YouTube does with e.g. music videos hosted on DailyMotion. If a posting on VK or Weibo could “spread out” to Western audiences without someone manually picking it up and reposting it on Western social networks, we’d see so much more cross-cultural engagement and understanding. If someone on Facebook could add someone on VK as a friend, even…
I have a strong feeling that if highly-evolved aliens ever tried to uplift our civilization, they’d start by demanding the removal of any artificially-imposed culture-level barriers to human-to-human communication.