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Spain’s LaLiga has blocked access to freedom.gov
- tjpnz 8mo agoUS ISPs would do the same if the EU started hosting the unredacted Epstein files.
- Hikikomori 8mo agoAre they restreaming football?
- rvnx 8mo agowww.rt.com is blocked in a couple of countries in Europe, so it's not about football, rather to curb "disinformation" for the next elections or whatever. https://www.isdglobal.org/digital-dispatch/the-achilles-heel-of-eus-media-sanctions-reassessing-rt-deutsch-access-ahead-of-germanys-2025-federal-election/ https://www.isdglobal.org/digital-dispatch/the-achilles-heel... So, freedom.gov is also blocked to protect you from fake news I guess. Sad.
- mschuster91 8mo agoIt actually is, the IP it resolves to is Cloudflare.
- rvnx 8mo agoLucky you (this was not cynical) because for me there is no Cloudflare: This site can’t be reached Check if there is a typo in rt.com. DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN (just an empty A record)
- ShowalkKama 8mo agort.com does not use Cloudflare, they are a customer of DDOS Guard: $ drill -Q rt.com | tee $(tty) | xargs whois | grep org-name 91.215.41.4 org-name: DDOS-GUARD LTD $ curl --silent https://www.rt.com | grep '<title>[^<]\*</title>' | head -1 <title>RT - Breaking News, Russia News, World News and Video</title>
- potatototoo99 8mo agoRT is blocked in the entire EU as part of a sanctions round due to the invasion of Ukraine: https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2022/03/02/eu-imposes-sanctions-on-state-owned-outlets-rtrussia-today-and-sputnik-s-broadcasting-in-the-eu/ https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2022...
- KomoD 8mo agoRT is not blocked in the entire EU, I can access it just fine.
- Pakulander 8mo agoNo — it's not and I've just verified that. The RT website is accessible: people can visit it, create accounts, log in, and use all its features without restrictions. What’s changed about the RT is public perception. It’s widely recognized and labeled as a Kremlin propaganda outlet — which is precisely what it is — so audiences can approach its content with appropriate awareness. If someone can't access the page, it's likely caused by a particular ISP and not by "European censorship".
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- everdrive 8mo agoThe 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 8mo agoPretty sure it is all performative and the actual audience is the voters in the US.
- kbrkbr 8mo agoIt'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.
- SilverElfin 8mo agoI 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.
- NooneAtAll3 8mo agothe goal was to publicly display european censorship and to take down its moral "high ground" it succeeded
- potatototoo99 8mo agoMaybe in the US. In Europe it never convinced anyone, as it never would since anything minimally related to Trump is discarded automatically.
- mjorgers 8mo ago[dead]
- jmclnx 8mo agoNo surprise with that, I would think other countries will do the same. But as we all know, there are ways around that for people who really have to go there.
- rvnx 8mo agoUntil these workarounds are progressively made illegal or required to provide identification. https://www.generation-nt.com/actualites/vpn-age-mineurs-royaume-uni-vpn-verification-age-royaume-uni-france-identite-2071052 https://www.generation-nt.com/actualites/vpn-age-mineurs-roy... It's not ok at all, because such operators will get punished if they don't. Therefore they will more and more respect the law to block sites, etc.
- mschuster91 8mo agoNo 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 A lot of Cloudflare is netblocked during soccer games in Spain, this has been a thing for years now. 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 8mo agoWait 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 8mo agoYes, 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 8mo agoYes, 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-wins-court-order-requiring-nordvpn-and-proton-vpn-to-block-illegal-football-streams-in-spain-but-vpn-firms-say-they-have-not-been-notified https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/la-liga-w... [2] https://www.laliga.com/en-GB/news/laliga-secures-over-euro6135-billion-in-domestic-audiovisual-revenue-for-2027-28-2031-32-up-9percent-over-previous-cycle https://www.laliga.com/en-GB/news/laliga-secures-over-euro61... [3] https://www.theguardian.com/football/2025/mar/06/premier-league-revenues-almost-double-those-in-la-liga-and-bundesliga https://www.theguardian.com/football/2025/mar/06/premier-lea...
- tovej 8mo agoGood. freedom.gov is a clear subversive political influence campaign that should be banned by all European countries.
- rvnx 8mo ago[flagged]
- mschuster91 8mo ago> We have the best bottle-caps in the world. Spoken like someone who never walked the Isar river beaches in the morning after a Saturday night in summer. Used to be full of plastic bottle caps from all the party goers, now it's just the metal beer caps that you can easily pick up with a magnet.
- rvnx 8mo agoFair enough, this is actually a positive regulation. This was more to put on perspective that innovation and gaining market share are the main priority in US/China, whereas in Europe, priority is more on regulation. For example, one of the priorities here in the EU is to regulate and tax AI companies, rather than to make the place attractive.
- adithyareddy 8mo agoThe chip on the server hosting this comment was almost certainly printed with an ASML lithography machine. I get the sentiment but the bottle-cap meme needs to die. Innovation and regulation are not opposite ends of a slider where you have to pick one or the other.
- rvnx 8mo agoI'm totally on your side that ASML, Airbus and a couple of pharmaceutical companies are great innovators and very special (in a positive way) companies in this world. But still, this is where I slightly disagree, because I feel the more regulation, the less innovation is possible. Here just feeling frustrated when I see that freedom.gov getting censorship of that overall tendency to regulate, rather than to actively promote freedom of entrepreneurship, of expression, of thinking out-of-the-box etc, and this freedom.gov thing is just a symptom of that whole system.
- embedding-shape 8mo agoFWIW, 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 8mo agoIt resolves now but also other websites that are blocked during games are available.
- KAMSPioneer 8mo agoAt 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 8mo ago> 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 8mo agoTrue, 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.
- 13415 8mo agoThat 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.
- diputsmonro 8mo agoI feel like this move is premature and playing directly into Trump's hands. "See how Europe flinched at even the suggestion of free speech, we haven't even started yet" Surely whatever they eventually put up on there will be blatant and horrible propaganda, but I think judging the reactions are the purpose of the site, not the content itself.
- XorNot 8mo agoThe site was created for the express purpose of enabling bypass of sovereign policy decisions: so yeah, it's going to be blocked.
- Ferret7446 8mo agoIt's a canary, for the governments who claim they have free speech. If they then block this site, then they're giving away the game. Government have the right to censor whatever they want (until they're overthrown), but they can only lie that they have free speech.
- herbst 8mo agoIt doesn't matter anymore. Trump is saying and turning everything the way he wants. The majority of the world doesn't listen anyway and you guys seem to have a horrible time either way.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- stackghost 8mo agoPerhaps Europe should put up a portal to bypass American copyright restrictions. Free speech, and all that.
- iamnothere 8mo agoAs an American I accept your terms. More freedom for all.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- helterskelter 8mo agoIf Europe would set up a way to facilitate non-Europeans getting GDPR protections I'd pay them a good bit of money.
- altairprime 8mo agoPortugal’s golden visa only costs a year’s salary!
- kube-system 8mo agoCopyright 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 8mo agoThat'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.
- kube-system 8mo agoAnd 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.
- mrtksn 8mo agoIt's misleading title, not Spain as the government but LaLiga(a sports organization) abused its given powers and apparently demanded that ISPs block the site. So it's very American style censorship in principle, that is it is censorship for profit reasons HOWEVER it is wrong in this particular instance because freedom.gov hadn't infringe copyrights. Nothing political despite what the title may make you believe so, purely internal issue. Italians are having similar problems with their football streaming organizations.
- petcat 8mo agoI'm not aware of American ISPs and CDNs straight-up blocking websites. That is distinctly European-style censorship. American style censorship would be more like going through the courts to get an order to have the domains seized.
- mrtksn 8mo ago[flagged]
- petcat 8mo agoDomain seized. Not blocked by my ISP. It's a fundamentally different thing. In Europe, ISPs and CDNs just block websites willy-nilly at the request of La Liga, for instance. That doesn't happen in USA. It takes a court order and then the FBI seizes the domain.
- mrtksn 8mo agoWhy do you care about ISPs that much? It's the exactly same thing as an outcome, just different concerns and methods. Also, when you don't do anything illegal in USA just take away your company either by forcing you to sell it or forcing American companies not doing business with you. TikTok was removed from Apple AppStore forcefully, then reinstated and forcefully sold. Why ISP blocking is considered low morale but seizing your stuff high morale endeavor?
- rock_artist 8mo agoIt’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.
- nubinetwork 8mo ago[flagged]
- kasey_junk 8mo agoNot 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 8mo agoIs it football or handegg?
- isodev 8mo agoI 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”
- muyuu 8mo agowhy? 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 8mo agoSome 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?
- mocmoc 8mo agoSpain living in 2010’s tech
- redbell 8mo agoFor those wondering what is this freedom.gov thing, it was discussed here a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47067270 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47067270
- EugeneOZ 8mo agoJust checked - not blocked, works just fine (Adamo and Vodafone).
- LtdJorge 8mo agoAdamo never blocks, at least for me. Vodafone does.
- aucisson_masque 8mo agoThe situation in Spain with laligua is becoming crazy, completely crazy.
- drnick1 8mo agoIt's sad to see that, in Spain, the soccer mafia controls the country.
- hedora 8mo agoIgnoring 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.
- exabrial 8mo agolaughable on both sides.
- eaf7e281 8mo agofreedom is not coming
- carlosbaraza 8mo agoI 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.
- hulitu 8mo ago> 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 8mo agoThe Mafia here it's LaLiga and Tebas.
- carlosbaraza 8mo agoCloudflare 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?
- morissette 8mo agoIt looks like a landing page… wth is freedom.gov?
- mezod 8mo agoif Spain does that to protect LaLiga football games, god knows what they do against political rivals or movements such as Catalonia in 2017...or now?
- ionwake 8mo agoWhe you realise the most culturally important things in Spain were dragonball and football this all starts to make more sense. I don’t know if this still is the case but it seems so.
- aprilnya 8mo agogreat website explaining the situation for anyone not familiar: https://hayahora.futbol https://hayahora.futbol (language switcher in the top right)