> why wouldn’t the first response be action on the part of ISP and backbone providers?
Schneier points out that these have the shape of probing attacks and are executed across multifaceted services at the micro & macro level. I feel like something needs to be done now. There is, I am sure, a fix but with something like Dyn and other major cloud management, infrastructure, ISP and backbone companies are getting seriously worked over. There is a saturation point.
The attackers have capabilities to hit so many different pieces of exposed surface area, that for small networks/apps/services/companies they are unable to be repelled. In between small companies and Google tier service, some can repel attacks, but they still cede some uptime and performance.
Cloudflare has released some insane reports and when you have motivated powerful attackers striking key pieces of core internet infrastructure, to some extent, you have to consider the entire system is under hostile attack.
> but at a point where DDoS has a significant effect on the market share of a company like Google
I am certainly a layman here, but none of the targets made a choice today to be vulnerable. I am sure the entire chain is rapidly reinvesting and hardening the infrastructure, but this should have probably been done years ago. In between when the companies are pouring resources out (I suspect they are now) and when they gain enough of an understanding to withstand these attacks, there will be downtime. I think google will get hit soon. It was reported that a google core outage of ~15 minutes deadzoned about 40% of America's internet traffic. Even knocking google out for ~1-2 hours would show 2008 what too big to fail means. If google DNS, Chrome, google search, gmail, google apps, hosting, dns, ISP all activities ceased for 2 hours things would get bad.