[utrack]

They block the whole of Cloudflare R2, I believe the Docker hub is just (heh) a collateral.

When the La Liga match starts, everything that's proxied via CF (including zero access reverse tunnels) stops working.

There's even a website made for checking if the match is on: https://hayahora.futbol/

You can check if your host is affected: https://hayahora.futbol/#comprobador&domain=docker-images-pr...

[micw]

Who exactly is blocking and on what legal base? If it's Spanish ISPs and they are massively over blocking, why are there no legal actions against them? (E.g. for not fulfilling their contracts)

[Moldoteck]

Football lobby is strong in Spanish political system. It's legal

[nikanj]

On the one hand, you have money and famous footballers. On the other hand, you have a bunch of nerds whining about the internet being broken. The average voter (and politician) is out watching the soccer match, and doesn't care about the internet.

[landdate]

Boredom is a bigger issue than hunger or thirst for the average person living in one of these obscenely wealthy countries. For them, impeding entertainment is to impede nourishment. Of course, while anything that aids the entertainment industry is despicable, I do think obstructing the internet is a nice treat for humanity. The only down side is to your point about the relatively insignificance of the people effected (nerds).

[eazel7]

then I think we should move all possible services to cloudflare maybe when nothing works for them they start to care

[dariosalvi78]

it's institutional corruption at all levels, legislative, executive and judicial. A systemic failure that favour abnormous private profits over basic rights of the citizens.

The effort required to change the situation is massive.

[dankwizard]

What right exactly? I don't think there's a human right for access to all IP addresses.

[dariosalvi78]

> In the Summer of 2016, the United Nations Human Rights Council released a non-binding resolution condemning intentional disruption of internet access by governments. The resolution reaffirmed that "the same rights people have offline must also be protected online." [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_Internet_access

[Parodper]

ISP are blocking, because of a district judge's ruling.

[ClikeX]

The wacky thing is. It's blocked due to legal action.

[mr_mitm]

Why do they do that? Sorry, I don't speak Spanish.

[michaelt]

The football league would rather not have pirates livestream their ~90 minute games.

Pirates would rather not be blocked, so they create a new, disposable website for every game. Any blocking must happen fast.

Cloudflare would rather not block websites without a court order specifying the sites to be blocked.

The courts would rather not create a special fast lane through the courts, just to resolve a squabble between two huge corporations.

[n6242]

> The football league would rather not have pirates livestream their ~90 minute games.

Funny enough, I work in IT and I've had to use a VPN to be able to do my job when soccer is on, but my two non-tech-savy family members that do watch soccer using pirate livestreams say that they've never had any issues with blocked streams.

[KAMSPioneer]

I work in IT and have found that the issue impacts my work but not my ability to stream sports from sites of questionable legality. Of course, I don't pirate La Liga matches but that's primarily because I don't give a shit about soccer.

But the point is that the measure does more to block legitimate use than illegitimate (in my experience). And next they want to go after VPNs. Wonderful.

[fc417fc802]

But think of the children ... and futbol!

[miohtama]

Think of all political donations

[cdelsolar]

soccer is awesome and it is incorrect to not "give a shit" about soccer

[spwa4]

But you must realize, the alternative to this is that some very wealthy Spanish companies ... lose a small amount of money.

Surely you understand now. Go about your business, poor person.

[ryandrake]

They don't even "lose a small amount of money." They simply gain less money than usual for a short period of time. Think of how rough that is for them.

[necovek]

I think it's even that they "gain less money than they could if everyone watching illegally would pay for it when they could not watch illegally" (that's usually how companies crying "piracy" calculate "losses" — "let's assume everyone watching illegally would certainly still watch it and pay the full price").

[shiroiuma]

This isn't quite right either. It's "they gain less money than they might potentially gain if piracy weren't physically possible". If the piracy avenues didn't exist, how many people would actually pay full price to the legitimate sources, and how many people would simply go without?

[joquarky]

I once remember reading an article about shareholders selling off a stock because the rate of increase in profit had slowed.

[array_key_first]

Arguably they even gain more money in the long run, because more people have access to their entertainment and they have more opportunities to form life long connections with consumers.

[hunterpayne]

In all fairness, the Spanish economy is a mine, a farm and a soccer league in a trenchcoat. Better than Ireland which is 2 tax shelters in a trenchcoat, but not by much. Not surprisingly, they are the 2 most left leaning countries in Europe. To be fair, they had an actual fascist government in Spain for several decades and there were atrocities committed.

[cool_dude85]

Ireland, the country with 2 center right parties that differ with regards to patronage networks and political history from 1940, is one of the most left-wing leaning countries in Europe?

[lentil_soup]

> Cloudflare would rather not block websites without a court order specifying the sites to be blocked.

why would they?

> squabble between two huge corporations

I think this is just LaLiga using it's cultural and economical power, don't think Cloudflare or the courts should be making exceptions just so they can control how people watch football

[mlyle]

> why would they?

Well, in this case, the alternative is all of Spain intermittently blocking lots of Cloudflare.

But if Cloudflare bows to Spain in this case, every jurisdiction will want to pile up lots of special case rules for Cloudflare to try and implement.

[pxc]

LaLiga isn't Cloudflare's customer. They have no relationship. So why would Cloudflare rework their infrastructure just to instrument rapid blocking at their own expense as a favor to LaLiga? And if they don't, ISPs just break the Internet for each soccer match? This is a kind of coercion that makes no sense. Cloudflare has no obligation like this to LaLiga (and neither would a Spanish domestic CDN!).

[mlyle]

The reason why entities comply with the wishes of courts is because there's consequences if they don't. Consequences like being filtered.

[gruez]

>why would they?

Plenty of companies proactively take action against shady users, even if not 100% required under law. Youtube has content id, social media companies have "community guidelines", and ISPs have AUPs.

[teaearlgraycold]

The US is captured by the Israeli lobby. Spain is captured by the football lobby.

[Pay08]

So what, do they just block a range of IP addresses and are then done with it?

[swiftcoder]

technically, LaLiga themselves doesn't even do the blocking. They have a court order from some years ago that allows them to compel all the individual ISPs to block any IP addresses they specify, with no oversight or review

[bartread]

This must negatively impact a huge number of businesses. Is there no move for them to all get together to take legal action against LaLiga to stop them doing this?

[hunterpayne]

This is the country that takes a 2 hour nap every day. They also have a sleeping contest every year with a winner and everything. And Spain isn't hot like Mexico where folks take 2 hours off in the topically heat and make it up for it in the evening because that's more efficient.

[miohtama]

Think of the all political donations this would lose

[quadrifoliate]

Here's a good English-language article about it, with a timeline: https://daniel.es/blog/cloudflare-vs-la-liga/

Looks like same old regulatory capture.

[maest]

Also, a classic tweet from the Cloudflare CEO re their fight with Italians authorities re censorship:

https://xcancel.com/eastdakota/status/2009654937303896492

Everyone looks bad in this conflict.

[post-it]

How does this make Matthew look bad?

[AgentME]

Calling on JD Vance and Elon as if they're known for a principled respect for free speech is crazy. It just reads as unnecessary propaganda or a poorly-disguised threat from powerful friends. I'm generally inclined to agree with Cloudflare here and the post makes me question that.

[encom]

Matt acting like he's a free speech absolutist. Hilarious.

[petcat]

Italy and Spain are the bad actors here. Not cloudflare.

[nslsm]

HN in 2026: free speech is hilarious.

[bethekidyouwant]

On a scale of oppression he certainly leans towards free.

[prmoustache]

Because LaLiga and football in general is what is governing Spain really.

[otherme123]

There are some sites that stream a pirate signal of the football matches, and they stream through Cloudflare proxied IPs. They share the IP with thousands if not millions of other sites.

When the match starts, Movistar (a big ISP, but also a TV platform that streams legally football matches) sues itself in the following terms: "we, Movistar TV, demand that Movistar ISP blocks the following IPs that are being used to stream our matches illegally", on a special and urgent procedure. The judge tells Movistar-ISP to block the IP, which they do in seconds. Now replace Movistar with the biggest ISPs in Spain, and you have more than 80% of the country with Internet capped for hours (except if you know how to use some kind of tunneling)

As the pirates share the IP with so many sites, because the IP is actually a Cloudflare proxy, a big chunk of the internet goes down. Users complains, and Movistar ask Cloudflare to block the real IP and spare the rest. Cloudflare says that they cannot legally do that as no judge actually told them to.

Our Spanish judges are historically inept when talking about copyright, internet, file sharing and similar stuff. Some of them might be more updated, but there has been cases that they ordered some publications to surrender their lithographic plates, because a cover has to be retired as late as 2007 (https://www.elmundo.es/elmundo/2007/07/20/espana/1184937587....). So I don't think they understand much more about what is an IP other than "a IP is a number assigned to a computer". And Movistar is quite happy with that.

[bakugo]

The website has a language selector on the right just below the initial screen, just FYI.

[lentil_soup]

to stop people pirating football streams while matches are on. Insanity

[ShowalkKama]

to """"""""""prevent piracy""""""""""

[sva_]

Ah man, that shader in the background is like a rite of passage for people including a shader on their website.

https://www.shadertoy.com/view/lscczl

[aftbit]

Ah the irony, I'm blocked from viewing that page by Cloudflare

Performing security verification

This website uses a security service to protect against malicious bots. This page is displayed while the website verifies you are not a bot. Incompatible browser extension or network configuration

[jojobas]

Great, time to proxy through AWS, Azure and GCP so that these muppets block Spain from everything.