Agreed.

I was merely citing use of Cloudflare as evidentiary, not determinative.

I am not so sure about the relevance of billing entity. I suspect that how Cloudflare chooses to bill is as much driven by tax (especially transfer pricing) as anything else. I also think there are as-yet-unanswered questions about the role of CDNs and similar “global” infrastructure providers, and the impact of using their services as subcontractors (cf intermediaries), in interpreting jurisdiction. These services are obviously different to the “traditional” autonomous systems (routed networks). I am not sure that the law has caught up with this yet. But that is a tangent.

Thanks for the thoughtful debate.

Likewise, thank you for a meaningful and civilised discourse.

To expand upon your observations regarding the role and the function of global infrastructure providers — what I find most disquieting is the manner in which the Internet has degenerated from a realm of open discourse, at times resembling the untamed frontier, into a labyrinthine construct of proliferating legislation and extrajudicial interference by a multitude of states.

The result is a regulatory morass so burdensome that, in certain instances, it proves more expedient to disregard an entire jurisdiction than to endeavour compliance with its statutory dictates. Even when such legislative efforts are conceived without malice, their consequences are seldom benign — the attendant escalation in implementation costs can be considerable. By way of illustration, conformity with the EU’s GDPR must now be accounted for at the very architectural level of a solution, with financial implications that are far from negligible.