Spain's parliament will act against massive IP blockages by LaLiga (opens in new tab)

Context: last year LaLiga (top-level Spanish football league) obtained a court order compelling Spanish ISPs to block certain IPs during football matches, as those IPs have been associated with illegal streams of live matches. Many of those IPs are shared Cloudflare IPs, with the result being many legitimate sites become unavailable in Spain during LaLiga matches

https://cybernews.com/news/spain-laliga-streaming-piracy-cam...

One of the things that so often gets lost in politics is the concept of a stopping principle. If you know you want to do X, be it "enforce traffic tickets", "spend money chasing drug trafficking", or anything else, you really ought to be able to articulate some sort of stopping principle where you stop pouring the resources in. Maybe the problem is adequately solved. Maybe the further resources don't justify the tiny incremental change. Maybe the intrusion on liberty starts to overwhelm the benefits. Something. Otherwise you just end up going farther and farther down the road with no idea when to stop.

These IP blocks don't seem to come with a stopping principle. They were large and growing, and inevitably more and more entities were going to say "Hey, if that company is large enough to flip the switch to protect their assets then I'm large enough for that too!" and the obvious and inevitable stopping point was 100% blockage.

Taken to its logical conclusion, and I do mean "logical" and not "rhetorically overblown for effect", this comes perilously close to just declaring that the value of the Internet is so net negative due to piracy that it should just be shut down in Spain. If that's true during certain sports matches it's already not far from being true for lots of other things too. This was leading in an obviously-economically-untenable direction.

Finally. The situation is ridiculous and afaik it really didn't do anything to solve the piracy problem.

Genuinely never thought I'd see the day. This has been horrible for me running an event ticketing business in Spain... where downtime is basically not acceptable.

I'm interested in how those conversations went between the LaLiga and Cloudflare that convinced them to do this. I know I'm not Cloudflare, but if a company (any company) came to me demanding blocking IP ranges according the their schedule that would require a bunch of work on my end to make it happen, there's going to be a lot of push back. It'd take a dump truck load of money to make that happen.

It is insane that you could block access to hundreds of sites just because some people decided to watch an ilegal stream.

hope that doesn't end on "monitoring the situation" and doing nothing. entire cloudflare IP blocks are being blocked, even on work days

Finally. For anyone affected by this, I have been using Clouflare WARP successfully to bypass this block.

Great, this means Telefonica reliability goes from zero nines to still below zero nines.

That a sports league was empowered by the courts to do this in first place is buck wild to me. I live in America, so it's not like I'm unaccustomed to the government giving preferential treatment to corporations but I cannot fathom a court allowing the NFL to tell ISPs to block IPs across the entire country.

I wonder why didn't Cloudflare just say that technically they can't block the IPs for a short time as they have no mechanism to do it and it would take a significant amount of $$ to develop it.

Right after this statement they could have permanently block all the IPs and let the outraged customers make enough noise that would have prompt the government to act sooner.

Love the hypocrisy (my IP is blocked):

403 ERROR The request could not be satisfied. Generated by cloudfront (CloudFront)

> The PP and Vox voted against it. Junts abstained from the session.

This is the bad guys.

Very ironically I get this error trying to read the article:

403 ERROR The request could not be satisfied. Request blocked. We can't connect to the server for this app or website at this time. There might be too much traffic or a configuration error. Try again later, or contact the app or website owner. If you provide content to customers through CloudFront, you can find steps to troubleshoot and help prevent this error by reviewing the CloudFront documentation. Generated by cloudfront (CloudFront)

Qui blockat blockodiodes? Cloudfare, it turns out....

I understand organizations as LaLiga wanting more money but massive IP blockage seems quite unfair, effective maybe but unfair so this news does not come as a surprise.

Sorry. Why can't an indivudual bad actor site be targeted without affecting non bad actor sites? Why does the blocking have to be so broad?

What you need is some form of - European - megacorp getting hurt by this and going after LaLiga for a ridiculously huge, LaLiga-destroying amount of money.

Play stupid games... win stupid prizes.

The judicial, nation-wide blocks on CDN IPs is absurd and should have never been allowed.

It’s not football; it’s LaLiga.

About time, this was crazy and should result in some action against cloudflare for allowing it

An IT peon at La Liga has the chance to do the funniest thing …

Wait, so a private company in the business of men kicking balls around a field was able to make this happen without government support?! How?

If IP addresses are a shared resource then it shouldn't be possible to block an IP or IP range because some of the domains are hosting illegal stuff.

This is like blocking access to a street, a block of flats or even an estate because drug dealers and hookers operate from them.

Yeah, like in the massively ilegal user spying case with LaLiga app, where the fine can be huge in Spain (kinda like messing like the FCC in the US if not worse).

So politically speaking how influential is LaLiga compared to other nation's football leagues, or America's largest sports leagues?

And yet democrata.ch, who released the article, blocks me from accessing their free website because of my VPN :)

I'm torn on this. It always should have gone through the courts, but the fact is that cloudflare are providing access to illegal content and not doing anything about it. They were left with two choices if Cloudflare refuse to act. Either accept it (oh well, too big to fail), or block them.

I dislike what is happening but I kind of like that they don't care about the size of Cloudflare and hold them as accountable as they would a small hosting company in Belarus. Blocking entire ranges due to illegal content isn't exactly new, the scale is new.

Again though, I really dislike that it isn't going through the legal system