I think the difference is that Cloudflare is the one party providing streaming access for their customers: not just anyone can proxy the data through Cloudflare, they need to be a Cloudflare customer first.
When I'm posting this message to Hacker News, I'm the "customer" of this website. I'm not customer of all the intermediate nodes in the chain. So if I were to write something illegal and HN would be irresponsive to takedown requests, the courts could order the IP of HN to be blocked, not some intermediate ISP.
When I'm posting this message to Hacker News, I'm the "customer" of this website. I'm not customer of all the intermediate nodes in the chain. So if I were to write something illegal and HN would be irresponsive to takedown requests, the courts could order the IP of HN to be blocked, not some intermediate ISP.