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Comment by asp1 | Hacker News Reader

Some context the article misses: there's a court order that allows the Spanish Football League to block websites which may be unlawfully broadcasting football, and the ISPs have to comply. Since Chrome activated ECH, LaLiga requested the order to be expanded to block individual IPs, to which the court happily obliged, and this order is being used to block Cloudflare's IPs ranges.

The result is that web browsing in Spain on weekends, when football is on, is severely impaired, with thousands of web sites going down as matches play. This is a breach of the court order itself, which clearly states that "no unrelated sites may be affected", all while the court order itself probably being illegal as well. And, of course, IPTV pirates found ways around the block.

bandaancha.eu is doing a fantastic job on the reporting of this.

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> bandaancha.eu is doing a fantastic job on the reporting of this.

And LaLiga’s response to their reporting? Sending false abuse notices to their hosting provider [1]

[1]: https://x.com/bandaanchaeu/status/1892992576069783825?s=46

La Liga's president is known to be unhinged, so this is not a surprise.

>The result is that web browsing in Spain on weekends, when football is on, is severely impaired, with thousands of web sites going down as matches play.

At the risk of non-Spaniards being unable to understand: that's the most pandereta thing I've heard this year so far.

This is banana country-tier stuff.

More context: Telefónica used one of its group companies to file a complaint against itself and all other telecom operators in Spain, instead of filing a complaint against Cloudflare. As the operators, including the plaintiff Telefónica, acknowledge and accept the claims, the judge granted the measures.

> The result is that web browsing in Spain on weekends, when football is on, is severely impaired, with thousands of web sites going down as matches play.

Aaah, this explains some stuff. I'm on holiday in Spain right now, and a bunch of little blogs and similar sites just don't work at all for some reason. I bet they're hosted on Cloudflare Pages or using Cloudflare as a CDN layer.

I assumed it was just the hotel WiFi doing something weird!

I think the cloudflare issue only happens with movistar/digi. At least in my case I couldnt use github yesterday

They've been routinely blocking GitHub, I think because there are several repos tracking lists of IPTV streams? I often have to VPN to the US just to access my open-source repos.

Other ISPs are blocking as well.

So "only" the biggest broadband provider in the country :)

I've seen reports that Orange may have imposed the block as well, which is the #2 provider. Definitely a nontrivial slice of the population

Only Vodafone refused to implement the blocking.

Orange and Vodafone are also implementing the blocking but users are not noticing because they are doing it wrong: instead of blackholing the IPs or only blocking when connecting through ECH, they are blocking by DPI the access when using the IP address as the SNI/Host header.

  # curl http://104.21.16.1
  <META HTTP-EQUIV="Pragma" CONTENT="no-cache"><META HTTP-EQUIV="Expires" CONTENT="-1"><html>Por causas ajenas a Vodafone, esta web no est� disponible</html>
  # curl http://104.21.16.1 --header "Host: blockedsite.com"
  error code: 1001

(1001 is the expected output from Cloudflare)

Which is really useless, but I guess fulfills the court order (pandereta meets undefined specifications).

As one would need more reasons to hate football. It's a disgrace, here in Italy last year there were flooding in the center, some matches had to be postponed, people were digging up sand, basket clubs complained in silence, but there were some clubs like AC Milan trying to bitch about their important matches and league point, something that a person with common sense would never think, for real, people digging sand, people dying, and they had the guts to complain about their league points, they're psychos

Is sand dug to construct dams?

What's a "basket club", and how can a thing complain in silence?

I suspect a translator app? AI translator? The complain in silence makes me think the intent is "complain but not heard"?

Think the parent is referring to other big Serie A clubs

Basket clubs complied (sorry) without objection

This previously happened in Italy, and was quickly undone as "a mistake" after being called out.

I see in Spain it isn't a mistake.

> court order itself probably being illegal as well

How so?

The simplified answer is that Spain has greater net neutrality laws than most other places, and on top of that the relevant European Union laws specifically forbid any lawful blocking/enforcement action if it causes a nontrivial amount of collateral damage to unrelated parties. So in theory the court order should've violated both Spanish and European law.

https://www.redes-sociales.com/bloqueo-cloudflare-parte-lali...

Legally is it collateral damage to unrelated parties. It is cloudflare's servers providing the infringing content, and the cloudflare's servers being blocked. Does Spain net neutrality protections grant some kind of common carrier protections to CDN networks? Would be nice if they did.

> the relevant European Union laws specifically forbid any lawful blocking/enforcement action if it causes a nontrivial amount of collateral damage to unrelated parties.

Then I guess the answer comes down to whether sharing IP address makes a party related.

What is ECH?

Encrypted Client Hello https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication#Encrypt...

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