Apparently all of south western europe blocks half the internet in the name of football. Besides Spain there's also Italy, France, Portugal and surprisingly the UK somewhat.
This was requested by the state gaming license authority, which sanction the betting business in France. Most of the business benefits the “Federation française des jeux”, the state gaming company.
Officially this was done out of concern for the safety of the French citizens.
I do wonder, was Polymarket given a chance to prevent itself from being accessed/used from Spain? They seem to be a-okay with blocking usage from US states that have asked them to cease operation, so I don't see why they would try to actively defy countries that have (legally) asked them to not do business there?
Gambling regulations exist in most places in the world, including the US. With good reason.
French people were already forbidden from transacting on Polymarket and Kalshi, and the services themselves were forbidden to take any market orders. Nobody disagrees with the regulations.
But apparently the French government still thought it was so dangerous that they needed to block the websites completely to protect the French people from themselves. This is where the line is crossed. There wasn't even a court involved at all.
This happens all over Europe. The citizens give their governments the power to block things, or mass surveillance in the name of "safety" and then they just take everything and EU citizens are left wondering why.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_Uni...
The US government cannot compel ISPs to block websites. The only time it was tried was in 2022 to block some Israeli piracy site, and the federal court dropped the block within weeks after being hammered with first amendment lawsuits.
What we are seeing happening in Spain, France, and all across the EU, is literally impossible in the US.
Peter Dicks, David Carruthers
State violence is used to ensure compliance, so that companies self-censor.
Don't travel through the US.
every economy protects its crown jewels to a degree which seems excessive to its neighbors
Like how we all download hundreds of gigabytes of Linux ISOs.
Most people just set up a seedbox with a VPN connection (this is what I do) and I never worry about it.
Blocking itself is ofcourse not at all controversial in Europe. Aside from some free speech maximalists people have no problem with shutting down criminal operations.
I do not think blocking websites was a goal in either of those mergers, they were just trying to become big like Apple/Amazon/etc and not just be a dumb pipe like ISPs should be.
[0] https://www.laliga.com/en-GB/news/official-statement-in-rela...
Which was horrible and had lots of collateral damage when these blocks were initially implemented, but when you were affected, you wrote a complaint that the website been collaterally blocked, and the next time they did the "match blocks", the website was no longer blocked.
Now years after, nothing of value is blocked during the games, at least for me on Vodafone, I don't even notice the blocks anymore (besides hearing the neighbors screaming during the matches themselves).
It's a horrible idea in general, and clearly against both our "European Values" and Spanish constitution, as we should have access to a free internet which clearly isn't true. But on the other hand, it's important to reflect the situation as it is right now, in the real world, rather than lamenting about what was.
Sadly I don't care at all about football. So I can't even boycott the football league that should not be named to make any difference...
I think the elephant in the room is that Movistar, who own TV rights for Laliga and asked the judge for the blockage, offer CDN and anti-DDoS services that are competing with Cloudflare on the Spanish market. I believe it was a twisted way for them to protect their position in the spanish market.
Care to elaborate? They block by IP, that's not granular at all. What complaint mechanisms are you talking about?