“The site went from 1B requests per day to 30-35B requests per day over a weekend.”
One man ran a joke-named IP lookup for 12 years and it became internet infrastructure. Over 90 percent of the traffic was malware and abuse. He got legal threats from a state CISO for the crime of returning IP addresses. Cloudflare now owns it, which is one more piece of the internet’s plumbing in one company’s hands.