Don’t forget cloudflare
I don't see those cloudflare pages much these days, but something about it in those early days always gave me protection money vibes. Cloudflare seemed to come out of nowhere during a wave of DDoS attacks across the internet in the late 2000s and found their way into every site. They had some incredible timing.
They do, they've been a CDN as long as they've been DDoS protection. But they definitely do DDoS protection for a much greater portion of the internet than they host.
How do you track people on the internet? Make them go through a single gateway that ‘protects’ 90% of websites. Would explain why they’re always so reluctant to block unsavoury websites.