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By rock_artist 2026-02-2221:194 reply 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
By learningstud 2026-03-021:55 I've come to believe that democracy doesn't work because most citizens don't want to work it. Many of the legislations passed are harmful to the majority even when the intentions are good. Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell, and Friedrich Hayek have been saying this for a century.
By graemep 2026-02-239:19 > 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.
By watwut 2026-02-239:49 > Freedom is impotent,
Did you meant to say important?
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”
By josephcsible 2026-02-232:591 reply 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".
That extreme centralization makes the single choke-point vulnerable to all kinds of other problems. The web is supposed to be decentralized and distributed.
By croon 2026-02-2310:12 I agree with you on the technical premise, but I think the point made was that the bigger the disruption, the greater the backlash and swift reversal, in ideal theory at least.
By JumpCrisscross 2026-02-234:132 reply In theory. It’s strange to argue about hypothetical issues with something currently defending against actual problems. One battle at a time.
By handoflixue 2026-02-235:541 reply I'd hardly call decentralization a "hypothetical" issue: we've already seen governments are willing to issue gag orders so that we can't even find out what they're doing inside major companies. That's clearly a lot easier to do when there's a single central point of control.
If there's a single central point of control, then that also means an outage takes everything offline, instead of just 1-2 tools. That also makes it a bigger target for attackers.
By jen20 2026-02-2318:39 It doesn't even need to be an attacker - CloudFlare themselves have managed to take down impressive portions of the internet more times than should be accepted just this year.
By throwaway290 2026-02-236:42 So do you apply the same logic for measures gov/Apple/etc put out about on-device scanning and e2e messaging stuff? It's always "hypothetical" until it hits the fan.
By josephcsible 2026-02-234:26 Sure, I agree there are bad things about extreme centralization. I'm just saying that the increased collateral damage of censorship is a silver lining of it, not one of the bad things about it.
By learningstud 2026-03-021:57 What DDoS mitigations are there besides the less affordable Akamai?
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
By MichaelZuo 2026-02-232:531 reply 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?
By AnthonyMouse 2026-02-233:381 reply Collective punishment is such overreach that it's a violation of the Geneva conventions. You do that and you no longer have more than 0% legitimacy.
By MichaelZuo 2026-02-234:462 reply I meant even after the fact they still believe to some degree of legitimacy.
By AnthonyMouse 2026-02-235:02 Believing that an action is legitimate when it isn't simply means that they're in error.
By inigyou 2026-02-235:59 [dead]
By KAMSPioneer 2026-02-2310:261 reply 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.
By otherme123 2026-02-2321:10 > 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.
By nubinetwork 2026-02-2223:132 reply [flagged]
By kasey_junk 2026-02-230:36 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.
By cwillu 2026-02-232:15 Is it football or handegg?
By carlosbaraza 2026-02-237:122 reply 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.
> 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.
By carlosbaraza 2026-02-2323:30 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.
> 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".
By carlosbaraza 2026-02-2323:34 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?
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.
Pretty sure it is all performative and the actual audience is the voters in the US.
By kbrkbr 2026-02-2221:45 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.
By NooneAtAll3 2026-02-2221:285 reply the goal was to publicly display european censorship and to take down its moral "high ground"
it succeeded
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.
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.
Are you forgetting how the Americans blocked Stormfront and Silk Road? They don't have full access to the Internet either, they're just not so obviously totalitarian about it as the Europeans.
By nozzlegear 2026-02-234:00 Stormfront was deplatformed, not blocked by ISPs. Silk Road wasn't deplatformed or blocked, the owner got his ass arrested and thrown in prison.
By hdgvhicv 2026-02-237:38 You talking about Texas right? Half the states in the us block and age gate those sites.
By wat10000 2026-02-233:15 Many parts of the US require age verification for porn as well.
By Hikikomori 2026-02-236:12 It's only UK that does that, and they're not in the EU. Many us states do the same, and the administration wants to ban porn completely and jail those who make it.
The ISPs do what our elected governments direct them to do. It’s how democracy works. If you don’t like what people are voting for, get into politics and talk to your community. Or at least email your MEP. There is no conspiracy here.
Cute that you think that's how it works. I guess you're also thinking everyone that voted for the current administration agrees with them on everything they do and voted them in exactly for that. I am at least glad you didn't say if you don't like how it works, move elsewhere.
I know that’s how it works and I also know it’s not a zero sum game. That’s why every law or policy gets time for comments and debate and sometimes policy gets revised. It’s how governance works.
But if you feel you have the perfect solutions, then by all means get yourself on the ballot so we can finally see the light.
By welshwelsh 2026-02-236:293 reply What websites a person is allowed to access should not be a matter of debate, it is for the individual to decide. Other people's opinions are not relevant. Even if 99% of people think a person should not be able to access a website, it is still their right to do so and they have no need to justify it.
Democracy is for deciding what to do with taxpayer money. It shouldn't be a mechanism by which people can vote to take away other people's freedoms.
By refulgentis 2026-02-232:17 Sorry you have to deal with our culture warriors, cheers. It's funny to watch someone get a 1st grade instruction in civics while raving.
By 0xDEAFBEAD 2026-02-231:311 reply "The situation for free speech in Europe is even worse than I thought"
https://eternallyradicalidea.com/p/the-situation-for-free-sp...
By goobatrooba 2026-02-237:092 reply I read through this drivel and it's nothing more than conjecture and anecdotes from someone who seems never to have been to Europe. Nearly every example of his critique is of the UK, not Europe as a whole, and each of them has plenty of counterexamples of the same thing happening in the US.
In short: nonsense. Completely made up narrative filled with quotes from same-belief people, claiming moral outrage about issues they either don't understand or wilfully misrepresent.
I'm pretty sure the President and CEO of the leading free expression organization today understands what he's talking about and is fully aware that there are bad things happening in this vein in the US.
Do you have any specific disagreements you can share with the criticism of the actual content that the parent comment gave, or do you think that the author's job title is more important than whether what they said is actually correct?
By 0xDEAFBEAD 2026-02-2316:021 reply The parent comment in question has essentially zero in the way of supporting evidence. The author's first claim happened to be verifiable. I attempted to verify it, and it was pretty clearly false.
What's asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
By saghm 2026-02-2317:57 I guess I might not have been clear. I'm specifically wondering about this part, which is what I was referring to about the critique they gave of the actual content:
> Nearly every example of his critique is of the UK, not Europe as a whole, and each of them has plenty of counterexamples of the same thing happening in the US.
Separated from the ad hominems on both sides, it seems like a pretty reasonable criticism to me. It doesn't seem obvious to me that it should be dismissed as irrelevant.
Well, I mean, I think it's pretty obvious that when someone claims that the author is "claiming moral outrage about issues they either don't understand or wilfully misrepresent" then what he does for a living matters.
The guy who literally actively helped to create the current USA situation? Yeah. All the while he pointificated about free speech, he had clear favorites whose speech mattered and who should shut up.
By 0xDEAFBEAD 2026-02-2316:25 When the left is censoring more (as was true in the run-up to Trump's election), of course a free speech organization will be opposing left-wing censorship more frequently.
Censorship doesn't help your team, just the opposite. https://www.thefire.org/news/blogs/eternally-radical-idea/wo...
Trump's election was a reaction to left-wing cancel culture. If people had listened to FIRE, and refuted bad ideas instead of censoring them, maybe Trump wouldn't have been elected: https://qr.ae/pYCVXO
By 0xDEAFBEAD 2026-02-2316:00 >Nearly every example of his critique is of the UK
I just used a word count tool to sanity-check this claim. It said there are 1061 words about the UK and 1684 words about non-UK countries.
You appear to be fibbing about easy-to-check facts. Anyone who trusts you on your harder-to-verify claims is a fool.
There seems to be a bit of a pattern I've noticed with Europeans on HN. They criticize the US constantly, yet flip out instantly when their countries are criticized, to the point of reflexively lying about stuff which is easily checkable.
I can sorta understand lying about claims which are hard to verify. It's distasteful, but I can understand why a certain type of person would do it. But, why lie about stuff which takes under 60 seconds to check? What are you trying to accomplish?
BTW, I hope you aren't in Germany. It's a crime to insult someone or spread malicious gossip online in Germany. Your usage of "drivel" might be considered an insult which could get your phone confiscated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bMzFDpfDwc#t=3m
> 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.
By bryanrasmussen 2026-02-233:00 There was a comma, after which it said "not in the way the US is trying to suggest." You evidently missed that part, or are you saying that it is in exactly the way the US is trying to suggest?
By laughing_man 2026-02-232:242 reply Do Europeans see "yet another nonsense" coming from the US or coming from the EU?
By watwut 2026-02-238:04 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.
By potatototoo99 2026-02-2221:361 reply Maybe in the US. In Europe it never convinced anyone, as it never would since anything minimally related to Trump is discarded automatically.
Also because internet censorship and censorship in general has largely become normalized in Europe.
By potatototoo99 2026-02-2222:429 reply No it isn't. For example in my EU country I can see the list of all websites blocked, and all of them are for piracy/copyright infringement and illegal betting (legal betting is allowed, but must register and pay taxes). That and rt.com. I can also say/post whatever I want in social media except stalk and harass individual people. There is no "censorship" at all compared to virtually anywhere else in the world, US included.
By SanjayMehta 2026-02-231:192 reply Blocking RT is not censorship?
Nor is sanctioning your own journalists? Or a former intelligence agent, a Swiss national who worked for NATO, and now lives in Belgium?
By goobatrooba 2026-02-237:214 reply You link to a comment which lists a number of russian-paid propaganda actors spreading lies and hate. They have not been censored by a government but by courts which based on evidence identified breaches of law. It's something very different from censorship.
By SanjayMehta 2026-02-245:12 Pensioner called Merz "pinoccio," now faces police investigation.
Even our "authoritarian" PM Modi ignores petty nonsense like this. You people need to wake up.
https://www.stimme.de/heilbronn/stadt-heilbronn/friedrich-me...
RT was not censored by any courts of law. It was censored by an unelected executive branch.
By SanjayMehta 2026-02-2312:58 Col Jacques Baud is the exception to your rant. He's a retired swiss intelligence officer who served with NATO.
He didn't even quote a Russian source in his books, has refused to appear on any Russian media channel.
Now explain why he's sanctioned.
By SanjayMehta 2026-02-2312:00 So say when China censors USAian and European sites, that's authoritarian, but when Europe does it it's very different from censorship.
Got it.
Blocking someone who's sole purpose is to destabilise your region is wrong? You are an idiot if you think that one should let them spread their lies and anti EU propaganda freely.
By AnthonyMouse 2026-02-234:111 reply > all of them are for piracy/copyright infringement and illegal betting
Does that include all of the sites that share the same IP addresses as those sites?
For that matter, you're posting a reply to an article about a European country blocking the website of a generic US government VPN service, and the service isn't even operating yet. So not only have they graduated to censoring VPNs, they're now censoring a website whose only content is political criticism of their other censorship.
Good lord. Your response only proved his statement. Blocking rt.com glaringly showcases the eye-rolling, ridiculous and "moving to dangerous-territory" censorship that the EU is performing - my opinion as a citizen of an Asian nation.
How much dangerous censorship does your Asian nation carry out? India, for example, blocks thousands of websites - no sex work for them - and regularly shuts down the Internet entirely.
By goobatrooba 2026-02-237:151 reply Ah yes, there is a foreign government sponsored campaign to deligitimise and spread lies about your country and government. And because you are a democracy you should just accept it and let lies and propaganda flood your country? Can't even make these entities follow the law as they operate outside your legal framework. So let them lie and manipulate people while claiming to be "news.l".
This is how democracy dies - when we stop caring about truth. This is how fox ruined the US, when lies becomes fine just because they are "opinion" or "entertainment".
By brainwad 2026-02-2317:25 Hate to break it to you, but European countries have equivalent foreign news propaganda services: Deutsche Welle & France24, for example. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. If European countries weren't such nanny states, they would trust in their populations' critical thinking skills.
By kvemkon 2026-02-230:54 > That and ...
lenta.ru ? (aha, management personnel has been replaced 2014 [1])
[1] https://t.me/systemasystema/89 [RU]
By stinkbeetle 2026-02-231:501 reply > No it isn't.
Yes it is.
> For example in my EU country I can see the list of all websites blocked, and all of them are for piracy/copyright infringement and illegal betting (legal betting is allowed, but must register and pay taxes). That and rt.com.
You provided a counter-example that disproves your claim in the next sentence. I'm just flabbergasted.
By goobatrooba 2026-02-237:201 reply Blocking a propaganda outlet by a hostile foreign government is not censorship and certainly not "general censorship that is normalised."
If you know that a foreign actor intentionally tries to undermine your government you honestly think the right course of action is to just relax and let it happen? Absurd.
Europe has seen it's share of dictators and knows that a democracy needs to also protect itself.
By stinkbeetle 2026-02-2312:25 A regime dictating what its people may and may not read about is exactly censorship.
Not op, but here: https://www.gespa.ch/en/fighting-illegal-gambling/access-blo...
By brainwad 2026-02-2317:23 Let's be real, this is just protectionism. The most popular prediction market in the world is DNS-blocked, in the hopes of redirecting you to some crappy online casinos instead.
By otherme123 2026-02-2321:23 Not true. Going to assume you are from Spain. Try posting a recording of the police. Try posting something praising terrorism. Try a joke about victims of terrorism. A humour magazine called Mongolia has been fined with 40,000€ for publishing a joke about Ortega Cano. Try offending religion publicly. All of that is allowed in the US.
Every country in Europe has some restraint to freedom of expression (lots of them ban either nazi or communist symbols, for starters). US has none.
By CamperBob2 2026-02-230:49 That's normalization.
US is infinitely worse than EU but selectively based on what ruling party wants you to both see and post. try to get some coverage from gaza or west bank and/or post something slightly critical of israel and see how that works out for you. EU, China… are at least up front about what they want to censor and why, US censors every fucking imaginable thing while people are too stupid to see it and go “oh my, look how bad EU/China are…”
By AnthonyMouse 2026-02-234:23 > try to get some coverage from gaza or west bank and/or post something slightly critical of israel and see how that works out for you.
On a US ISP aljazeera.com loads right up, as does The Guardian and RT.
By CamperBob2 2026-02-230:502 reply US censors every fucking imaginable thing while people are too stupid to see it and go “oh my, look how bad EU/China are
No, we do not. You've been lied to. You should go back to whoever told you that, ask them why, and ask them not to do it again.
By bdangubic 2026-02-231:51 no one told me silly :)
By blackcatsec 2026-02-231:241 reply I mean there are an increasing number of states that are requiring age gating for pornography access for sites like PornHub. It's only a matter of time before that age gating expands to non-pornographic entities, which is the ultimate goal of the plan.
By CamperBob2 2026-02-231:322 reply Unfortunately you're probably not wrong, but the fact remains, none of this is happening at a national level. Yet.
By outside1234 2026-02-2315:33 "censorship" (aka not allowing hate speech from Nazis)
While conveniently ignoring or gaslighting everyone about this admins own censorship.
By SilverElfin 2026-02-2221:12 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.
