Spain's parliament will act against massive IP blockages by LaLiga

https://www.democrata.es/en/politics/congress-and-senate/congress-will-act-against-massive-ip-blockages-by-laliga/

by akyuu • 3 months ago

520 225 3 months ago

pulimento• 3 months ago

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

e1g• 3 months ago

We actually had to revert our rollout of CF Workers because enough of our users were in Spain and couldn’t access endpoints at seemingly arbitrary times (due to the matches)

estebank2• 3 months ago

Your customers should be proper Spaniards and be watching the match, hence not noticing the downtime! /s

dylan6045• 3 months ago

They are only seemingly arbitrary to people that are not actually paying attention. Now that people are, the blocks are known in advance to those that look at a the schedule. Sure, it sucks to have to build this into your own schedule, but that's better than it happening "unexpectedly". You could do something crazy like import these times into your own calendar with reminders.

bombcar• 3 months ago

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

pier255• 3 months ago

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

superjose2• 3 months ago

1000% I got legit Cloudflare Workers Anycast IPs that I was using for websockets blocked.

I also got blocked from using RustDesk.

It's been crazy. As this happens intermittently. I had to set up a tailscale exit node in one of my servers to circumvent this crap. I lost several days and called Vodafone (ISP) to understand what was going on.

That's when I read Reddit and saw that crap.

lostlogin• 3 months ago

I’m suprised no one has sued over it, some sort of class action.

GranPC• 3 months ago

I don't think RustDesk was hit by this. If you weren't able to access it two weeks ago, it was due to an outage on their end: https://github.com/rustdesk/uptime/issues/53

sparrish• 3 months ago

Play stupid games... win stupid prizes.

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

pfortuny• 3 months ago

That shows the power of the Spanish FA and Telefonica together.

officialchicken• 3 months ago

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

loloquwowndueo• 3 months ago

Joining a select club that includes GitHub and Anthropic yay

ACCount37• 3 months ago

Nah, those two have a proud one nine of reliability. It just feels like it must be less when you eat every single outage to your face.

LocalH• 3 months ago

Negative nines

matteason2• 3 months ago

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...

inglor_cz• 3 months ago

I fervently hope that no one manages to obtain a similar judgment at the pan-EU level, that would be a disaster.

dmitrygr2• 3 months ago

I actually hope they do. this will force a proper reckoning about the situation and maybe a proper fix.

WhyNotHugo• 3 months ago

At that scale, it might make Cloudflare customers reconsider their affiliations. It might not be as terrible.

By affecting only Spain, the impact is too small for most websites to care.

arlort• 3 months ago

I don't think there's an injunction mechanism like that at the EU level

And even if there were I doubt the legal basis in EU law exists for such an injunction

pjc502• 3 months ago

Maybe someone can explain, but I don't understand why such an order isn't applied to cloudflare themselves?

halJordan• 3 months ago

The state hasn't setup processes to enable that. It will happen

tshaddox2• 3 months ago

Presumably the Cloudflare network resources in question were not located in Spain and thus not under Spanish jurisduction. Or even if they were, it may be procedurally simpler for the Spanish government to compel ISPs to block IPs.

martin8412• 3 months ago

It was. La Liga isn’t satisfied with the response time of Cloudflare. Cloudflare would not commit to content being taken down during while the match is still going.

La Liga wants to be able to point to a URL hosted by Cloudflare and demand it taken down that instant while the match is still on. It would require dedicated staff at Cloudflare to deal with La Liga stream takedowns.

AtNightWeCode• 3 months ago

CF would pretty much need to monitor this live in that case which is impossible. The pirates sometimes even create new domains for specific games.

This is a risk with shared IP addresses. I sold CF to many customers and I would say the risk in general is minimal. At least outside Spain. But people should stop whining and use a better service if needed.

evilmonkey19• 3 months ago

Personally, myself I have been greatly impacted by this measures. Several services of mine were unavailable because LaLiga said so. No notification, no justification, they block and that's all. It has been a shame since the beginning.

thaumasiotes4• 3 months ago

What would it look like if you sued La Liga for using their lawful blocking power in a way that injured you?

embedding-shape14• 3 months ago

No notification

What ISP? I'm using Vodafone and if I accept the insecure connection (because of mismatched certificate), I get served the notification. You don't get that?

madduci• 3 months ago

In Italy, Serie A got the approval of Government to do so, which is even worse

basisword• 3 months ago

As shitty as the government approach is here we can't keep glossing over the fact that a significant part of the web is now incredibly dependent on Cloudflare and no matter how many times we face issues with huge consequences nobody seems to care.

oliverx02• 3 months ago

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

kinow• 3 months ago

I hadn't heard about Cloudflare WARP. Found this Reddit thread with questions/comments I also had, https://www.reddit.com/r/CloudFlare/comments/ldejnt/how_is_c..., and also what I think is CF's main website for WARP info, https://one.one.one.one/ (which I must confess I had never head even though I use 1.1.1.1).

I struggle with LaLiga's filter during matches, but I am more interested if it'll help with latency/speed. Have you noticed any different when using WARP vs. without it regarding Internet speed?

Thanks!

oliverx02• 3 months ago

Nope, I would say speed remains the same!

noIdeaTheSecond• 3 months ago

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.

dwedge9• 3 months ago

It's been going on for a while, but a couple of weeks ago they announced it would be expanded to other sports, that's probably why

nemomarx• 3 months ago

Who says it's effective? The pirate streams still go up every game, as far as people report here. They can just change their ips or hosts occasionally.

It's the honest businesses who probably won't go through the effort of evading the block every time.

otherme1235• 3 months ago

Also, clients of the streaming sites are quick to find and spread workarounds, mainly VPNs. But the small shop in the same IP selling to middle/older aged lose business and look unreliable to their clients, that can't even spell VPN.

dwedge9• 3 months ago

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

dghlsakjg2• 3 months ago

It did go through the legal system. That’s what forces the block.

rtkwe4• 3 months ago

It's unreasonable to expect cloudflare etc to be able to proactively identify legal vs illegal streams. The companies who own the copyrights can't even get that right much less a third party that has no idea if a stream is licensed.

charcircuit4• 3 months ago

Cloudflare can assign IPs based off customer reputation. High risk customers get high risk IPs. This way legitimate businesses stay on IPs that don't get blacklisted and sketchier businesses go on high risk IPs before they potentially get banned.

dwedge9• 3 months ago

Who said proactively?

jeppester2• 3 months ago

Why though? Why is it unreasonable to expect a company to have some level of responsibility for serving clients that are using their platform for illegal activity?

It the same thing with social media and moderation. We don't have to let them off the hook just because doing the right thing would make them unprofitable.

stavros• 3 months ago

How much of a responsibility should the provider have to scan what they're hosting and proactively make a judgment on whether they should block it or not?

dwedge9• 3 months ago

Once again, who said proactively?

dwedge9• 3 months ago

Who should bear that responsibility?

pier255• 3 months ago

the fact is that cloudflare are providing access to illegal content

Why make CloudFlare ultimately responsible though? There are lots of companies between users and the servers providing pirated content. Cloudflare is just one step in the whole chain. Why not eg block Google Chrome?

In any case, blocking Cloudflare was a stupid thing to do. Especially because it didn't anything to solve the actual problem.

charcircuit4• 3 months ago

Because they own the IPs that pirates are connecting to which makes it relevant for those IPs to be blocked. They are the easiest IPs to find since you can just resolve the domain of the piracy site.

dwedge9• 3 months ago

Cloudflare provide a service masking the IP address of the illegal content, really you know the answer to when them and not Chrome

embedding-shape14• 3 months ago

Why not eg block Google Chrome?

I think you're not faithfully trying to adopt their perspective here, even if you don't agree with it (just like me).

They need (in their mind, again I don't agree) to block these sites somehow, as they see it as them "stealing" viewers, judges agree with this. Now, where can the block be done, and have the least amount of collateral?

Cloudflare is not playing ball and turning of the streams, and they appear too quickly to go through court orders all the time. Banning a web browser obviously has a huge scope, so you're effectively left with blocking based IP, DNS or both/either.

Considering they are breaking local laws, and judges feel like something should be done to stop that, the solution they arrived at, regardless of how shit it is, is probably the solution with the least collateral damage, even if it has quite a lot.

Again, I don't agree with the decision, but I can also see from their perspective that they don't have a ton of choices, if we adopt the perspective that it should be stopped somehow.

_flux• 3 months ago

I think the difference is that Cloudflare is the one party providing streaming access for their customers: not just anyone can proxy the data through Cloudflare, they need to be a Cloudflare customer first.

When I'm posting this message to Hacker News, I'm the "customer" of this website. I'm not customer of all the intermediate nodes in the chain. So if I were to write something illegal and HN would be irresponsive to takedown requests, the courts could order the IP of HN to be blocked, not some intermediate ISP.

dylan6045• 3 months ago

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.

xp84• 3 months ago

I thought the government just forced their ISPs to block. Was CF involved at all?

dghlsakjg2• 3 months ago

It wasn’t a conversation. It was a court order.

pjc502• 3 months ago

Cloudflare are apparently not involved. It's an order against local ISPs to block Cloudflare.

kelnos• 3 months ago

That's not how this worked. Cloudflare was not involved at all. Spanish ISPs were ordered by Spanish courts to block their customers from accessing specific IP addresses.

clort• 3 months ago

No conversation at all needed to happen. LaLiga got a court order. The order specifically stated that if LaLiga flag your IP address, the internet providers in Spain must block it during the match. Cloudflare have nothing to do with it.

Who could have forseen, that LaLiga would end up abusing this system!?

matteason2• 3 months ago

Cloudflare are very much pushing back: https://www.laliga.com/en-GB/news/official-statement-in-rela...

echoangle• 3 months ago

Through this conduct, Cloudflare is actively enabling illegal activities such as human trafficking, prostitution, pornography, counterfeiting, fraud, and scams, among other things.

Pornography is illegal in Spain now?

gnfargbl• 3 months ago

That statement from La Liga is nothing short of embarrassing. Raving about child pornography, in a simple copyright infringement case? And the repeated focus on "IPs" is incredibly disingenuous; Cloudflare's multiplexing of half the internet onto a small number of IP addresses is not exactly a secret in the tech community.

Why are Spain's courts allowing this injunction to stand? It's clearly being used to bring the court system itself into disrepute at this point.

booi3• 3 months ago

This statement really makes no sense..

Google, Cloudflare, VPN providers, and other entities facilitating piracy are responsible for the illegal activities they enable and profit from.

Why wouldn't ISPs be responsible too? or the cable modem providers? or the computer providers? or your eyes. Let's just blame all those things and not the person that made it or the person that consumes it.

asveikau• 3 months ago

From the link:

Cloudflare has facilitated by knowingly protecting criminal organisations for profit

The propaganda is strong with these guys ...

alprado50• 3 months ago

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

booi3• 3 months ago

try 45 million sites including many absolutely critical to people's lives and health.

https://trends.builtwith.com/cdn/Cloudflare

wraptile• 3 months ago

And people wonder why Spain is doing so poorly when tribal corporate entertainment takes such a priority over everything else.

tonyedgecombe2• 3 months ago

I wonder why you think "Spain is doing so poorly".

DocTomoe• 3 months ago

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.

jerf• 3 months ago

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.

hnlmorg4• 3 months ago

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.

What you’ve described there is completely overblown for rhetoric.

The internet is still needed for delivering legal streams of matches. So there’s never going to be any pressure to turn off the entire internet.

Plus the likes of Amazon, and other online businesses would sue the hell out of La Liga for loss of trade.

So there’s no way in hell the situation would descend into your “logical conclusion”.

That’s not to say that the situation couldn’t get worse that it already is. Just that your logical conclusion isn’t very logical.

pdpi2• 3 months ago

The internet is still needed for delivering legal streams of matches. So there’s never going to be any pressure to turn off the entire internet.

Cloudflare serves a whole bunch of legal and genuinely important services, and yet there was enough pressure to block them off.

walrus01• 3 months ago

Blocking large swathes of cloudflare IP space at the entire CIDR range level has significant negative repercussions on thousands of other completely non-football related companies, governments, non-profits, personal projects who are hosting content on them. It's absolutely unfair to those impacted by this extremely heavy handed method.

It's like saying there's some people who have been seen selling counterfeit made in China purses from a blanket in a street market in one particular neighborhood in a big city, so we're going to erect a roadblock to all vehicle and pedestrian traffic, and cut off metro train access to the area.

ajsnigrutin• 3 months ago

I think in this case, it's more of a concept of causing damages and not having to pay for them. If LaLiga had to pay for every lost cent of revenue for every site blocked by their too-wide ban, they'd rethink what they're doing.

But with copyright, everything is broken everywhere, so they don't have to.

matheusmoreira• 3 months ago

Why not declare that the value of La Liga's "IP" is a net negative and holding society back, and then simply invalidate all of it on the spot?

chihuahua• 3 months ago

That depends on whether Spain is interested in being a serious country with perhaps some technology jobs, or a clown show where the highest priority is Sportsball.

TZubiri• 3 months ago

I think if a court enforces a judgement and a court order, regardless of how trivial it was initially, all measures including use of armed force is warranted, the matter at hand stops being the original dispute, but sovereignity and power of the law.

Does it matter that it happens over IP or CSAM? It doesn't happen over CSAM because there is no dispute there, there is no desync there between spain,the us and cloudflare.

But the mechanisms around these court orders aren't much different than those that would be used for other illegal or contentious material.

If a vendor chooses to pool and encrypt connections in a way that it is impossible to filter by hosts, and that vendor doesn't comply with court orders, then a country should absolutely block that entire vendor.

The liability of an unrelated pooled service failing is either the responsibility of the vendor or the application that chooses that vendor, not on the courts for enforcing the law without a subjective 'stopping point'.

What these vendors do is very similar to pooling in the layering phase of money laundering, but with packets: get traffic from legitimate customers, mix it with traffic from unlawful customers, pool them, and send encrypted EHLO so that the origin domain is encrypted and the packet source /destination are replaced by the vendor's. If this were done with money it would instantly trip all AML flags, but the tech world is much younger and hasn't discovered that laundering isn't cool or free as in freedom, it's a tool that the baddies use.

eggprices14• 3 months ago

Nothing stops the government from ordering Cloudflare to reveal the origin IP addresses of websites and then tracking them down and arresting them. They just don't want to. Cloudflare complies with court orders but the government doesn't think that's good enough. The government wants Cloudflare to be the internet police.

pixel_popping• 3 months ago

Love the hypocrisy (my IP is blocked):

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

necubi• 3 months ago

CloudFront may sound like Cloudflare, but it is an unrelated AWS service (https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/)

(Disclaimer: I work for Cloudflare)

eggprices14• 3 months ago

It's related because it does the same thing.

Apocryphon• 3 months ago

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

dbbk6• 3 months ago

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.

embedding-shape14• 3 months ago

Why would you be using Cloudflare when there are better options, especially if you've known for years that this has been going on? Seems like a poor business decision really.

Don't get me wrong, I hate getting blocked just because there is a La Liga game, but lets also take some responsibility for our own decisions here...

dbbk6• 3 months ago

Right I mean I had to move off Cloudflare. I looked into some creative options like DNS steering to keep it for all other countries, but in the end it was cleaner to just move away entirely which was a shame.

utrack• 3 months ago

Is there a good alternative option for their reverse tunnels/ways to hide my real egress that'll also block the bots?

here2learnstuff• 3 months ago

Are you saying your event-ticketing business having downtime is not acceptable or that having downtime for the Spanish demographic is not acceptable?

dbbk6• 3 months ago

For the business. eg you don't want to be able to not sell tickets, or scan tickets on the door...

Certary• 3 months ago

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

jimmydddd• 3 months ago

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?

wmf• 3 months ago

Because both sites are on the same IP address.

tonyedgecombe2• 3 months ago

Presumably that's a choice Cloudflare can make.

embedding-shape14• 3 months ago

Cloudflare don't want to lose the piracy stream sites as customers, so they can't throw them off their platform. They want to specifically block the stream sites and specifically only for Spanish visitors, so the only thing they can do is reject Spanish traffic for specific IP-ranges in their infrastructure. Result is a bunch of collateral damage.

aduwah• 3 months ago

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.

pas2• 3 months ago

it's not blocked by Cloudflare, but by ISPs (as far as I understand)

azalemeth• 3 months ago

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....

anthk• 3 months ago

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).

miohtama2• 3 months ago

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

This is the bad guys.

vfclists• 3 months ago

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.

lz400• 3 months ago

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

Havoc• 3 months ago

You can’t punish companies for court order against them. Thats insane

leosanchez• 3 months ago

It’s not football; it’s LaLiga.

b00ty4breakfast• 3 months ago

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.

pie_flavor• 3 months ago

America produces many things more valuable than the NFL, is the difference. LaLiga is presently the single most valuable brand in Spain. When e.g. Google asks low-polarization parts of the government for things, it frequently gets them.

globular-toast• 3 months ago

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?

eggprices14• 3 months ago

Their supreme court allowed it. Their congress is now overturning it.

Spain's parliament will act against massive IP blockages by LaLiga

Related Stories