It's difficult to track them down because their physical equipment is nothing but a middle-man now. You are talking indirectly to the servers.
Now what makes this special is the fact that in addition to indirect communication, the physical machines running the service are running encrypted content on a virtual machine. So whoever does own the physical machines has no idea what they're serving. In addition, those virtual machines don't talk to the users, they talk to the middle-man routers - so they don't know what they're serving or who they're serving to.
Basically, the only way to shut down the pirate bay permanently is to have every country in the world on standby, and within hours (maybe less) lead succesive raids on the physical router and balancer to find the physical locations the cloud servers the balancer has been speaking with. Then, they would need to collect evidence from those machines before getting locked out in the time remaining.
If they fail to find any of the cloud servers, they would have 0 evidence, just standard equipment with some encrypted addresses. By the time they would decrypt that info - if they could - the cloud servers would have already changed and the network could easily be reinstated.
And just for a kick in the nuts, they only have 8 hours to find the cloud-servers if they wanted any evidence of what those servers were serving.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
