Well first, I'm not (yet) concerned with the courts in this hypothetical. I'm only talking about CloudFlare's ability to abuse its position. Regardless of whether it's legal, is it right that they can do this?
Second, trademarking a name doesn't give complete ownership of that word to the trademark owner. WordPress can still exist, even though Microsoft owns the trademark for Word as a word processing application. The example I gave of oortcloudflares.com (or maybe less ridiculously something like micloudflares.com where it's about loud flares of sound coming from microphones) shouldn't infringe on their trademark in any way since they have nothing to do with networking. But again, all of that is irrelevant if they can just throw their weight around and crash any website with a name they don't like. Many individuals and small businesses wouldn't even have the money to take them to court.
>>I'm only talking about CloudFlare's ability to abuse its position.
Yes, I felt an eyebrow raise a bit when I read about Cloudflare getting the site taken down. It is a minor super-power.
That said, any power can be abused, but that does not mean that it will be abused, or that the potential for abuse means that we should eliminate that power.
In the case of CloudFlare, they so far seem like a responsible infrastructure provider, with a business model that aligns their incentives with being trustworthy, so I'm OK with it.
In contrast, I wouldn't even consider trusting any Meta/FB org with anything like this power, as their obvious behavior has been massively untrustworthy, and their business model makes it easiest to be untrustworthy.
The question is whether we are at risk of such power being extended beyond ICANN Cloudflare, etc. and to the likes of untrustworthy players like Meta, Alphabet, etc., and if so, what to do about it?
My point about litigation was sort of about that. You're reminding me of Slashdot in the 90s[1]. You're making good points and I don't disagree with them, but also a lot of this has already been covered, up to and including in the courts, and certainly within icann (et al). There are a lot of rules/agreements in place around how these things play out - it's worth investigating to see for yourself. One positive thing to keep in mind also is that the EFF and other groups keep a pretty close eye on those sorts of shenanigans.
[1] Just to be clear i do not mean this as an insult, just a reference point, these discussions were common on Slashdot back then as all the things you mention either happened or were hypothesized by various "governing bodies" or "agitators" like eff.
Second, trademarking a name doesn't give complete ownership of that word to the trademark owner. WordPress can still exist, even though Microsoft owns the trademark for Word as a word processing application. The example I gave of oortcloudflares.com (or maybe less ridiculously something like micloudflares.com where it's about loud flares of sound coming from microphones) shouldn't infringe on their trademark in any way since they have nothing to do with networking. But again, all of that is irrelevant if they can just throw their weight around and crash any website with a name they don't like. Many individuals and small businesses wouldn't even have the money to take them to court.