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Comment by chronogamous | Hacker News Reader

Your comment has got me genuinely intrigued. Would you care to elaborate how football has anything to do with the internet at all? (I'm writing this from northern Europe & as someone who has been avoiding football like the plague most of his life)

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There was a case at the highest court in Spain where LaLiga[0] sucessfully claimed that illegal streaming was causing hundereds of million of euros in damages. They essentially petitioned for mass blocking of IPTV, causing Cloudflare, NordVPN, ProtonVPN and a few others to get caught up in a sloppy and stupid dragnet. Whenever there is a football match on, a not-so-small chunk of the internet becomes unavailable. After the match is over, it works again.

[0] https://www.laliga.com/en-GB/news/official-statement-in-rela...

It doesn’t just last for a match, sometimes they start at 00:00 and take the entire day.

I think I should add that Cloudflare (based on USA) doesn't refuse to block those IPTV, but they require the block mandate to come through a United States court. La Liga believes that this is pointless, by the time that has happened the match would have been over weeks ago. So they asked a Spanish judge to allow them to compile a list of IPs and send them to the Spanish ISPs to block them. Of course the ISPs are forced to comply. Well, behind these Cloudflare's IPs is not just IPTV, but a lot of legitimate webpages.

> Well, behind these Cloudflare's IPs is not just IPTV, but a lot of legitimate webpages.

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.

Official docker registry, Kagi image search, and several blogs that I read were still blocked for me the last few nights at least. I'm using a local ISP, but I think they in turn operate over Orange.

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 don't care about football but even I admit the impact is limited due to the scheduling of the actual football games. I am either rarely using the internet at those times or the websites/business that need to be open outside of office hours knows better but to use cloudflare.

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.

"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."

Care to elaborate? They block by IP, that's not granular at all. What complaint mechanisms are you talking about?

The TV rights holders for football matches want to block pirate streams by any means necessary. Spain appears to be the worst, people get arrested in the UK for profiting off streams (so far, but the communication is pretty aggressive towards consumers too), I don't know about the other countries mentioned.

Wow, that's insane! If TV right holders actually got their way, it would enable them to control how a match is framed, and manipulate how the match is perceived at a country-level. Surely everybody watching should be able to see the same match being played, regardless of who controls the camera? The situation you describe sounds like a recipe for corruption and exploitation!

Really struggling to tell if this is meant as satire or not.

Even if it is, it doesn't make sense for me. Pirate streams changing the… framing? The author tried to be sarcastic, but it didn't really work out.

I think they are writing how news censorship can be used to edit opinions, but changed news to sports streams.

Like how we all download hundreds of gigabytes of Linux ISOs.

I appreciate the attempt, but I'm still dumbfounded by that comment. After all, pirate streams are 1:1 copy of the official ones, and news censorship isn't about seeding newspaper scans…

They largely can't do anything against consumers in the UK. One of the largest ISPs gave up sending the threatening letters because everyone just ignored them. Occassionally one of the tabloid hacks will write a piece about how naughty you are for pirating the latest <TV series finale>.

Most people just set up a seedbox with a VPN connection (this is what I do) and I never worry about it.

It's been on HN a couple times. They block cloudflare during matches because most "pirate" live streams are on there. That means you can't do any work that depends on a legit site that uses cloudflare. Or watch non football content if it's hosted in the wrong place.

They block cloudflare during matches because at least one pirate livestream was on there at least once. These blocklists only ever grow, and rarely shrink. Obviously, pirate livestreams are not on there any more, since it's blocked and for-profit pirates aren't stupid.

The UK’s premier league tv rights are worth a little bit over £1bn/yr. The rights holders are tv companies who also run most of the UK’s domestic telecoms, so they lobby incredibly hard and effectively to have pirate match streaming sites blocked.

There was a movement in the US over the past decade or so for media companies to buy up ISPs for the sole purpose of being able to apply blocking.

At least in theory the blocking in EU has to go through a judge.

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.

How do you know it's illegal if a judge hasn't ruled? In parts of Europe it's illegal to call someone's operations illegal if a judge hasn't ruled it.

In this case a judge who clearly does not use the internet for anything has ruled.

Comcast (an ISP) purchased NBC Universal in 2013, ATT (also an IPS) purchased Time Warner in 2018. But that was it, and both of those deals ended up being bad for the ISPs, with ATT already divested of Time Warner and Comcast trying to get rid of NBC Universal or whatever is left of it.

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.

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