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Comment by AdamN | Hacker News Reader

The only answer is publicly-resourced protection and it's not that weird when you think about it. My apartment has a basic lock that any locksmith can undo and I'm safe because of my community and government protection (police, mental healthcare, justice system, etc...). Seems like the same logic should apply to my website or other digital property.

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ISPs will gladly quarantine/rate limit folks for pirating stuff, why don't they use those tools to combat botnets? Though I could see this leading to a slippery slope of remote attestation for internet access.

> why don't they use those tools to combat botnets?

Because they probably don't care.

Community yes. Government protection no. When was the last time you heard of police stopping a break-in or making a successful investigation ?

Independent of police, in bad communities your neighbors are willing to break in. In good communities they don't.

Where this breaks down is that because of the nature of the internet and DDoS attacks it’s not something that can easily be solved with better policing - even identifying a perp might be near-impossible, and they might be in another country anyways. The government does try to prosecute botnets and DDoS attacks today, but it’s of limited success. Is there a practical solution here I’m missing?

I don't know about a "practical solution", but there are research efforts to think about new ways to build internets that mitigate some of these problems.

Here is one that I'm aware of: https://named-data.net

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