Why do they do that? Sorry, I don't speak Spanish.
Pirates would rather not be blocked, so they create a new, disposable website for every game. Any blocking must happen fast.
Cloudflare would rather not block websites without a court order specifying the sites to be blocked.
The courts would rather not create a special fast lane through the courts, just to resolve a squabble between two huge corporations.
Funny enough, I work in IT and I've had to use a VPN to be able to do my job when soccer is on, but my two non-tech-savy family members that do watch soccer using pirate livestreams say that they've never had any issues with blocked streams.
Surely you understand now. Go about your business, poor person.
But the point is that the measure does more to block legitimate use than illegitimate (in my experience). And next they want to go after VPNs. Wonderful.
why would they?
> squabble between two huge corporations
I think this is just LaLiga using it's cultural and economical power, don't think Cloudflare or the courts should be making exceptions just so they can control how people watch football
Plenty of companies proactively take action against shady users, even if not 100% required under law. Youtube has content id, social media companies have "community guidelines", and ISPs have AUPs.
Well, in this case, the alternative is all of Spain intermittently blocking lots of Cloudflare.
But if Cloudflare bows to Spain in this case, every jurisdiction will want to pile up lots of special case rules for Cloudflare to try and implement.
Cloudflare literally wasn't even a party to the ruling by which LaLiga has been compelling Spanish ISPs to do the IP-level blocking. They're just an affected third-party because the blocking scheme the courts have allowed LaLiga to impose on ISPs is on a per-IP basis.
Spain hasn't asked Cloudflare to do anything. Only LaLiga has acted like Cloudflare owes them a huge, expensive rework of their CDN's architecture for the purpose of censoring things for LaLiga purely as a favor to LaLiga. What LaLiga has over Cloudflare isn't a court order. It's a protection racket, or maybe a hostage situation, where court orders involving other parties are the gun held to the hostage's head.
Nor did I say they did.
The question was asked, "why would they [without an explicit order]" The answer is they probably shouldn't, but there's still an obvious incentive here.
Either they should police the content they serve themselves or they accept the right holders to do it (which sucks for everyone).
Also they certainly willing take all their customers as hostage, as they could certainly split their network into legitimate customers and shaddy ones so the blocking is not so impactful, but I guess they prefer to make it as impactful as possible to be able to complain.
Anyone can report illegal content on Cloudflare and Cloudflare will remove it. The pirate streaming sites pop up only in or just before the first few moments of the game, and LaLiga insists they must be removed instantly in order to prevent their losses. So what they actually want is preemptive removal without meaningful human review or anything else that could take 10 minutes.
That involves more than being responsive when someone reports abusive content or dropping bad customers. That requires becoming a censorship machine that preemptively treats all new customers as criminals, and probably having some unaccountable AI drive the censorship process. (That latter seems to be what LaLiga is pushing Fastly to do.)
That's beyond the legal obligations of infrastructure platforms, bad for the reliability of their service, and just a slice of what they'd have to do to rework their architecture to support this kind of preemptive censorship.
Yet this would actually be a better solution for everyone (except the pirates).
10 minutes seems like a reasonable response time that would allow a chance for human review. No football fan wants to have their viewing interrupted because they used a dodgy pirate site to watch it. Currently, pirates can simply use a VPN to get around the IP-level block while the huge collateral damage affects legitimate Cloudflare users.
Looks like same old regulatory capture.
https://xcancel.com/eastdakota/status/2009654937303896492
Everyone looks bad in this conflict.
When the match starts, Movistar (a big ISP, but also a TV platform that streams legally football matches) sues itself in the following terms: "we, Movistar TV, demand that Movistar ISP blocks the following IPs that are being used to stream our matches illegally", on a special and urgent procedure. The judge tells Movistar-ISP to block the IP, which they do in seconds. Now replace Movistar with the biggest ISPs in Spain, and you have more than 80% of the country with Internet capped for hours (except if you know how to use some kind of tunneling)
As the pirates share the IP with so many sites, because the IP is actually a Cloudflare proxy, a big chunk of the internet goes down. Users complains, and Movistar ask Cloudflare to block the real IP and spare the rest. Cloudflare says that they cannot legally do that as no judge actually told them to.
Our Spanish judges are historically inept when talking about copyright, internet, file sharing and similar stuff. Some of them might be more updated, but there has been cases that they ordered some publications to surrender their lithographic plates, because a cover has to be retired as late as 2007 (https://www.elmundo.es/elmundo/2007/07/20/espana/1184937587....). So I don't think they understand much more about what is an IP other than "a IP is a number assigned to a computer". And Movistar is quite happy with that.