Moreover, its predecessors, Freedom Hosting and Freedom Hosting II, were both the biggest purveyors of CP when they were taken down. If it walks like a duck...
The motivation for hosting something like this is to hide what you're hosting in a bunch of noise. Legal or illegal. Your goal is to make it hard to gather metadata about the service. There are perfectly legitimate reasons to want that...
That said, it's a foregone conclusion that if you host a service like this, people who want to distribute child pornography are going to flock to it. If you don't police the content, that's even more true.
In fact, in the case of Freedom Hosting II, the host was allowing the pedos to circumvent the normal limitations of the platform, in theory because they were paying cold hard cash, as well as allowing scammers to operate on the platform, also for cold hard cash. It's been suggested that as much as 50% of the content hosted on Freedom Hosting II was child porn.
If you knowingly allow people to use your service to distribute child pornography or commit other crimes, you're every bit as culpable as your customers. This type of platform costs not-insignificant money to run -- it's a business. Nobody is hosting this many services out of a sense of altruism.
And honestly, in the case of CP, if you're hosting it, including running a service that facilitates the hosting of it, you deserve to serve consecutive life sentences in prison and whatever harm befalls those in prison who get found out as pedos.
I mean, they even believe this is a zero day attack, I can't simply trust the quality of any information there.
Edit: they updated the link, here's the old link - https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2018/11/21/hacker-erases-65...
Freedom Hosting was the biggest service and it served CP. Freedom Hosting II was the biggest service and it served CP. Daniel's Hosting was the biggest service -- what do you think it served?
CP is the reason Operation DarkNet et al target these platforms for destruction.
That's the problem with prejudices, the people who have them can never see beyond them.
Also, I wasn't aware that "people who engage in or support child exploitation" were a protected class.
You're still trying to put words in my mouth, but by all means keep defending the despicable.
It's already a matter of law (in most western countries) that hosts have some amount of responsibility for what users of their platforms distribute and that's why other hosting services aren't structured this way.