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Comment by officialchicken | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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?

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

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