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rock_artist
beloch
Cloudflare has become so ubiquitous that they've become a major vulnerability for non-U.S. governments. The recent outages offered a small taste of what might happen if the U.S. government, on one of their random whims, ordered Cloudflare to block everyone and every site within a target country.
This in no way excuses what Spain is doing, but its important to recognize that the internet is becoming more of a battlefield every day.
hdgvhicv
Spanish citizens have control over eh Spanish government. If this is a concern they can of course change the law. Yes democracy is hard, you have to convince the country it’s important.
European citizens have less control if they aren’t Spanish citizens as they can only talk to their local and European representivies and not the national ones. But they can still raise the cause, and there nothing politicians like more than a popular cause which wins them votes. Enough people say they won’t vote for party X as they back the blocking and that becomes a policy at whatever party conferences Spain has
People in Spain and Europe have no control over America though. If the American governments blocks a site they have to comply with no representation.
Freedom is impotent, but it doesn’t mean what Americans think.
bilekas
> Spanish citizens have control over eh Spanish government.
The fact is LaLiga has more.. It's been that way for years. There was a case where they would (may still do) use the microphone on your phone via the laLiga app to hear if you were watching a match and correlate that with licensed venues.
They're the most aggressive I've ever seen, and their influence in the government is unmatched.
graemep
> European citizens have less control if they aren’t Spanish citizens as they can only talk to their local and European representivies and not the national ones.
Citizens of other countries have less influence on the Spanish government than Spanish citizens? Not surprising.
watwut
> Freedom is impotent,
Did you meant to say important?
isodev
I also see another side of the problem - too many services are proxied via CloudFlare making it easy to disrupt at the same time. Folks really need to try and choose alternatives instead of feeding the “world firewall”
josephcsible
How is that a bad thing? Our goal should be to maximize the amount of collateral damage that any censorship causes, with the ideal case being that the only two choices available to the censors are "no censorship at all" or "completely air gap yourself like North Korea".
jen20
That extreme centralization makes the single choke-point vulnerable to all kinds of other problems. The web is supposed to be decentralized and distributed.
learningstud
What DDoS mitigations are there besides the less affordable Akamai?
muyuu
why? so La Liga can more easily target smaller providers?
if anything the "world firewall" here has a redeeming feature, making this nonsense a lot more costly
MichaelZuo
Some people genuinely believe the european copyright system (and La Liga and the Spanish judiciary) has more than 0% legitimacy… is it truly that hard to imagine?
KAMSPioneer
Spanish ISPs comply because Spanish judges issue legal injunctions that obligate them to institute these blocks. Sure, Movistar/Telefónica would do it anyway (I understand that they're the rightsholder in this case), but other ISPs are forced to do this by the courts.
I'm a US immigrant here and since I couldn't give a shit about soccer it is extremely annoying to be blocked from websites for something I am barely aware of. The ultimate irony is that none of this bears fruit because I am capable of streaming these games with no VPN by just avoiding CF sites if I had any desire at all. The blocks are invasive and yet ineffective.
otherme123
> but other ISPs are forced to do this by the courts.
They are in theory. But they were claiming "technical difficulties" to block the IPs until they also offered DAZN (socker) in their TV packages. Now they are quick to ban.
Remember how this is working: TV operator (Movistar, Vodafone, Orange) demand ISPs (Movistar, Vodafone, Orange) that they block the IP for a couple of hours. The judge, who can't tell apart an IP from a car plate, agrees to the request. Nobody can appeal in practice the block, because if your site gets blocked, the judge now say "unblock", the ISPs claim "technical difficulties" to unblock, and the two hours are gone. Sunday after sunday.
You can avoid the block just proxying you traffic through a ssh loop to localhost, but that is not the problem. 99% of people won't do that to access your online shop, they just assume your site is down and buy from you competition. And sunday afternoon is one of the busiest day of the week for online stores.
nubinetwork
[flagged]
kasey_junk
Not sure I understand the joke but to be clear it’s a Spanish soccer (football) league blocking the ips not an American football (football egg) league.
cwillu
Is it football or handegg?
carlosbaraza
I have commented this in multiple occasions. What is happening here in Spain with LaLiga is just absurd. My company's domain gets blocked often because we use CloudFlare. In essence, any service using CloudFlare gets blocked often. The main problem is that the common Joe tries to navigate and finds that it doesn't work, and they blame their network, and when they come back two hours later after the game finished, the website works, so they move on. The only way for this to get resolved is if they blocked something critical and an accident happened because of that (e.g. hospital services, traffic control, or something like that). Eventually this will escalate to national courts (currently this was dictated by a regional court in Barcelona). But again, legal action is extremely slow. VPNs are becoming a must everywhere, because the Internet is becoming wild from all directions.
egorfine
> What is happening here in Spain with LaLiga is just absurd
So what? I don't see crowds protesting on the streets of Barcelona. People are compliant, unfortunately.
carlosbaraza
My point is that people don't understand nor know that this is happening at all. Even when I get customers complaining that the service isn't available, they don't believe that their ISP is blocking them because of football. It's almost unbelievable for how absurd it sounds that people don't even think that could be the reason.
hulitu
> My company's domain gets blocked often because we use CloudFlare.
Then don't use it. When I want to go to "example.com", I want "example.com", not Cloudfare, a "mafia organization" which is "protecting" "example.com".
anthk
The Mafia here it's LaLiga and Tebas.
hdgvhicv
Cloudflare is the outfit which offers protection, however they are failing to protect their customers.
carlosbaraza
Cloudflare offers some genuinely valuable services that protect you from exposing your infrastructure to the world wild web. And regardless why does a private institution like LaLiga have the power to censor anything they want for their own benefit?
everdrive
The most obvious outcome possible.I was never able to load the website myself, but if you centralize things to a specific website, it's trivial to block it. Since I could never load the site, I don't know if they had any plans outside of just putting up a website. If not, this was incredibly stupid.
mcny
Pretty sure it is all performative and the actual audience is the voters in the US.
kbrkbr
It's the same administration that stated that they sent a hospital ship to a country with public healthcare to take care of the sick people there.
Boy, I will miss this administration for their sense of humor and ingenuity. They always find something new. A firework of performance art.
NooneAtAll3
the goal was to publicly display european censorship and to take down its moral "high ground"
it succeeded
isodev
It failed. The outcome was europeans see “yet another nonsense” coming from the US. Also, it barely made the news because of other nonsense coming from the US and generally that’s limited to “international news”.
Also, we don’t actually have censorship in Europe, not in the way the US is trying to suggest.
drnick1
Yet, your ISPs don't give you access to the full Internet. First it's porn (age verification), then it's soccer, then it's social media (ID verification), then it's libraries. Soon, you even stuff that you take for granted, such as playing an online game, may require age/ID verification. At this rate, all you will be able to access soon will be center-left Euro propaganda.
0xDEAFBEAD
"The situation for free speech in Europe is even worse than I thought"
https://eternallyradicalidea.com/p/the-situation-for-free-sp...
ekianjo
> Also, we don’t actually have censorship in Europe
Of course you do. If you think it does not exist the brainwashing has worked on you.
laughing_man
Do Europeans see "yet another nonsense" coming from the US or coming from the EU?
watwut
I do not see it succeeding. I genuinely see it as an attempt to make child porn more available and to promote nazi. And considering the latter is basically official usa policy, europe still keeps high moral ground ... despite its own actual faults which are not this.
potatototoo99
Maybe in the US. In Europe it never convinced anyone, as it never would since anything minimally related to Trump is discarded automatically.
petcat
Also because internet censorship and censorship in general has largely become normalized in Europe.
outside1234
"censorship" (aka not allowing hate speech from Nazis)
SilverElfin
I think it looks stupid on the surface. But maybe it is a purposeful way to goad European countries into taking increasingly authoritarian policy changes like banning VPNs. They will use it to generate outrage among Europeans and undermine the leadership, and try to either split the EU along these lines or place friendly leaders.
Maybe this is conspiracy theory. But I feel like the aggression they’ve shown - even people like Marco Rubio - suggests they’re acting with a purpose.
redbell
For those wondering what is this freedom.gov thing, it was discussed here a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47067270
embedding-shape
FWIW, Vodafone ES still resolves freedom.gov fine via their own DNS resolver. They're usually very block happy, can't access Anna's, TBP and also not Cloudflare during La Liga games normally, as some examples. But freedom.gov still resolves seemingly.
Can any other Spaniards confirm if freedom.gov still resolves for them?
As a side-note, I don't know why anyone would want to block that website in the first place? Barely has any information about what it is, and doesn't seem to be able to be used for anything as of today either.
rock_artist
It resolves now but also other websites that are blocked during games are available.
KAMSPioneer
At 11.30 CET it resolved for me on DIGI ES, but as a sibling comment pointed out, there's no soccer game on at the moment, so that's probably why.
As for why it's blocked, isn't this website planned to be related to censorship evasion? By purporting to help Spanish ISP users circumvent the blocks on CF sites imposed by their government, this site would run afoul of the megalomaniacs that instituted the blocks.
embedding-shape
> At 11.30 CET it resolved for me on DIGI ES, but as a sibling comment pointed out, there's no soccer game on at the moment, so that's probably why.
Yeah, but if it's matching with the La Liga games, then it's just the typical "pirate-streams-using-cloudflare" block that kicks in, very different from the title which is "Spain's La Liga has blocked access to freedom.gov", which makes it seem like that website in particular is targeted.
If instead it's just about the general Cloudflare block we "enjoy" for match days, then this is way less interesting, it's just another collateral victim in the overly broad censorship.
KAMSPioneer
True, and I don't know for sure either way. But in either case Twitter will notice it and post about it , I suppose. Honestly freedom.gov is almost the least annoying thing to be swept up in this, for my part.
hedora
Ignoring the disastrous policies of the Spanish government, I find it telling that this was the year when it finally became worth it to pay to VPN out of the US, and also the year when this freedom.gov propaganda thing launched.
stackghost
Perhaps Europe should put up a portal to bypass American copyright restrictions. Free speech, and all that.
kube-system
Copyright was invented in England and was globalized by France by a treaty signed in Switzerland. The US didn’t join the treaty until 102 years later. Up until 1989 the Berne Convention was stronger than US copyright law.
stackghost
That's a neat factoid, but my point was about repudiating the current boneheaded US foreign policy rather than anything to do with where copyright was invented.
rockemsockem
The foreign policy of calling out silly censorship in Europe and violations of fundamental freedoms and making European countries implicitly acknowledge it by blocking a US site?
Seems great. Wish Europe didn't censor free speech.
kube-system
And my point is I don’t know why “Europe” would want to evade law that was their entire idea to begin with… and that they widely continue to enforce.
Copyright in Spain is automatic and life plus 70 years. Same as the US and every country in Europe except for Monaco and San Marino where it’s 50.
helterskelter
If Europe would set up a way to facilitate non-Europeans getting GDPR protections I'd pay them a good bit of money.
altairprime
Portugal’s golden visa only costs a year’s salary!
drnick1
It's sad to see that, in Spain, the soccer mafia controls the country.
aucisson_masque
The situation in Spain with laligua is becoming crazy, completely crazy.
mschuster91
No surprise, it's Cloudflare:
$ host freedom.gov
freedom.gov has address 172.67.219.106
$ whois 172.67.219.106
NetRange: 172.64.0.0 - 172.71.255.255
CIDR: 172.64.0.0/13
NetName: CLOUDFLARENET
This is not a dedicated block against freedom.gov, it's just the ordinary collateral damage from the fight against sports piracy. Sigh.
The truly fun fact here rather is that the US government seems to be unable to host a website on its own these days but needs Cloudflare's protection. It's either a grift, a hack job / MVP demo or every last competent person in IT there has departed or been DOGE'd off. Ridiculous.
SilverElfin
Wait that’s a thing? It sounds outright crazy to block people from going about their business and using the Internet to protect one particular industry. Especially sports, which is low priority to me and I am sure to many people.
iamnothere
Yes, it has caused major issues all across Spain, including interference with emergency services, but apparently the owner of the league has deep political connections or something. It’s also likely that the political class sees this as laying the groundwork for future censorship efforts, given their track record.
mschuster91
Yes, for years now [1].
Sports is worth billions of dollars - La Liga makes 6.1 billion € from domestic rights alone [2]. UK's Premier League made 7.1 billion € during the Covid years [3].
[1] https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/la-liga-w...
[2] https://www.laliga.com/en-GB/news/laliga-secures-over-euro61...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/football/2025/mar/06/premier-lea...
potatototoo99
Cloudflare could refuse to host illegal material or make it available in Spain. If they cannot or will not, this was the best solution the courts arrived at. Other Cloudflare clients could also decide to host elsewhere for Spanish traffic if they cared.
Symbiote
I assume court orders against Cloudflare have been tried. How come they are not effective?
Edit: according to this article, Cloudflare have not been ordered to block the sites. Very odd.
https://cybernews.com/news/cloudflare-spain-laliga-piracy-bl...
Symbiote
This Reddit post [1] says the block 188.114.96.0/23 is blocked.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1ravua8/psa_if_...
EugeneOZ
Just checked - not blocked, works just fine (Adamo and Vodafone).
LtdJorge
Adamo never blocks, at least for me. Vodafone does.
13415
That seems a bit fast since nothing is on that ridiculously looking website yet, but if this website is planning to host content that is illegal in the EU, then it will be blocked by many EU countries. Usually, these blocks aren't very effective. My country blocks most piratebay domains, for instance.
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It’s sad that most comments are just focusing on political bashing instead of the root problem here.
It’s the fact LaLiga and Spanish ISPs comply.
They’re “carpet” blocking entire IPs of Cloudflare.
Every weekend if I need to access some of my work websites which are affected by this (while there are football games) - I need to VPN to bypass the blocking.
I’m new in Spain so my ability of surfacing the Spanish law or the European is limited. But I really wish they’ll have to find a nicer approach instead of this aggressive approach.