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I would bet good money the attack is backed by people who want their old content offline, but dont want to been viewed in public as the bad guys.
I'm more cynical, I think it's just for clout and marketing. IA is widely known and used, so an attack is guaranteed to be noticed and generate news articles. They're also known for having large robust infrastructure, but they aren't large enough that an attack is impossible, so a successful attack is impressive yet still feasible. If someone can pull it off, it would make great marketing for their black market DDOS service and also grant huge bragging rights in certain communities.
I'm not sure why you are getting down voted. This is the conclusion I came to as well.
IA is one of those rare organizations that have an incredible online reach and notoriety but aren't backed by a trillion dollar corporation. Taking them down is easier compared to other sites with the same amounts of traffic, while still providing a lot of publicity. Another example would be Wikipedia, however most of their content is plain HTML and easily cacheable too. The IA has a lot of heavy media; videos, old software, photo's, etc not even mentioning the ability search over all those millions of pieces of content. It seems like a prime target for this kind of pubilicty stunt.