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Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times
- shevy-java 6mo agoSo what does this mean in english?
- loupol 6mo agoEven more hours where people in Spain will have to wonder why their online apps/services are not working anymore I suppose.
- mmh0000 6mo agoContext, a few days ago, this was a very popular article on HN: Tell HN: Docker pull fails in Spain due to football Cloudflare block https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47738883 TL;DR: Spain blocks A LOT of CDNs during footy matches, including ALL of Cloudflare, thus breaking most of the internet. All in the name of stopping "pirates".
- lamasery 6mo agoI wonder how close they are in broad economic damage to it being cheaper to just pay FIFA or whomever for some kind of nationwide viewing license (which they'd surely be able to negotiate way lower than a simple "cost to view every match, times count of Spanish residents" since that's nowhere near as much as they're getting out of Spain now)
- YawningAngel 6mo agoMovistar are paying a billion dollars a year, so probably a long way away
- lamasery 6mo ago$20/yr per Spanish resident? That's very few wasted labor-hours per worker per year (on average).
- calgoo 6mo agoNo thank you, i don't watch sports, why should i pay for that crap just so a corrupt judge can get another car or sit on some board of some company when they "retire"
- lamasery 6mo agoI'm not saying it's a good idea, I'm trying to get a handle on whether Spain is on track to de facto spend more than this per resident in lost economic productivity (to say nothing of whatever value we might like to place on sheer inconvenience for residents that doesn't have measurable GDP effects). Like just paying a tiny tax and calling it a day might be less crazy than the current path, which would highlight how nuts this is precisely because that's also nuts.
- martin8412 6mo agoThe number will increase each year for sure. If all people are forced to pay, what’s to prevent them from charging 100€ a year or more?
- bombcar 6mo agoIt's La Liga - Spain should just nationalize them and make it a division of the government.
- embedding-shape 6mo agoOr follow the example of the Barcelona football club and make it be owned by the fans and supporters themselves instead.
- toyg 6mo agoThat's effectively how it was in European countries, when TV was nationalised. Then everything became about extracting as much money as possible from consumers, and here we are.
- embedding-shape 6mo ago> TL;DR: Spain blocks A LOT of CDNs during footy matches, including ALL of Cloudflare AFAIK, I don't think it's "A LOT of CDNs", it's only Cloudflare, at least personally Cloudflare is the only CDN I can verify I lose access to during the football matches.
- avalenn 6mo agoMain ISP in Spain dynamically blocks IP it suspects sharing sport competition live streams. Began with football, now extended to other sports. Impact on legitimate traffic is real.
- ErneX 6mo agoIt’s multiple ISPs though. A judge sentence commands them to do it. Insane, I know.
- lode 6mo agoSee this story from 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47738883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47738883 Basically, to combat pirate streaming of football matches, La Liga (the Spanish football association) can compel Spanish ISPs to block wide ranges of IP blocks that are suspected of hosting those streams. This includes Cloudflare, which - due to lots of websites depending on them (see what happened when they went down last year: https://blog.cloudflare.com/18-november-2025-outage/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/18-november-2025-outage/ ) feels like half of the internet is unusable. This happens weekly when football is on. Now it looks like those bans are going to become even more frequent, which will have all kinds of unintended consequences.
- gspr 6mo agoI wonder when businesses will start suing ISPs for the losses they incur while they're cut off from half the internet.
- embedding-shape 6mo agoNo one here is being "cut off from the internet" during the blocks, you grossly misunderstand what's happening here. If you're on a residential connection, during play of the matches, you can't access any of the Cloudflare IPs, but everything else keeps working as-is. Most businesses already migrated away from Cloudflare once these blocks started happening, so most of the affected people are the ones using services that rely on Cloudflare. As mentioned elsewhere, don't get me wrong, it sucks, makes no sense and I wish it went away, and I'll keep complaining to the ones I can about it, but "they're cut off from half the internet" isn't accurate unless somehow half the services you use happen to rely on Cloudflare (which, at least for me, isn't true, maybe 10% of what I use daily is affected by this).
- gspr 6mo agoOk, I'm sorry for the hyperbole of saying "half the internet" if it's in fact 10%. But come on, that's still massive. It's not a stretch for small businesses to be reliant on residential connections either.
- amarant 6mo agoWtf? Just the other day I had chat about how stupid this is: they're blocking cloudflare to stop pirates! So half the internet goes down, but pirates just.. Don't use cloudflare anymore.. Or use a proxy... Or use tor... These policies cause nothing but collateral damage, and now apparently they've decided to cause some more of it! Good job Spain.
- otterley 6mo agoCloudFlare loves pirates so much that they disclose loss of DMCA safe harbor protections as a material business risk on all their SEC filings. Piracy friendliness is key to their business model. It’s a risky position that no other large-scale CDN is willing to take. Forcing piracy consumers to use Tor or other proxies is unlikely to be popular. They’ll still be used, for sure, but so long as CF makes pirated content easily accessible over the Internet, this is just going to keep happening. It’s just too damned convenient. I don’t believe CF is going to win here, long term. If Spain and other countries block their ASNs, enough of their legitimate paying customers may start abandoning ship, and CF will have to get serious about unplugging notorious proxy configurations for piracy origin servers.
- calgoo 6mo agoBut cloudflare has no issue blocking the content if they receive a court order. The issue here is that La Liga wants to be able to get content blocked because they say so, and it has to be done right now. I also don't support these organizations that destroy the sports that people love, force you to subscribe to different services as each game and "liga" has made their own deals to make as much money as possible. Until we remove the stupid amount of money that is involved in these sport events nothing will change. And now they are talking about other events like movies, series and live entertainment show. Hopefully they come for the VPNs next and break every business VPN tunnel whenever they want. Hopefully that will cause enough backlash that they finally fix this BS once and for all.
- otterley 6mo agoDMCA notices (and whatever the EU equivalents are) are designed to avoid the need for court orders. Every service provider that sends content is obligated by law to cease sending the content upon receipt of that notification. CF ignores them because they believe (mistakenly in my view) that the law doesn’t apply to them. And every time they are sued for facilitating piracy, instead of letting the case to proceed to trial, they settle out of court.
- applfanboysbgon 6mo agoFile "selling out your country's communication infrastructure to people filming other people kicking a ball around" under things science fiction writers failed to predict about capitalist dystopias.
- smallmancontrov 6mo agoHey, that FIFA Peace Prize won't pay for itself!
- amarant 6mo agoI hear la liga wants to do a prize too!
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- wiml 6mo agoYou may enjoy the 1952 novel The Space Merchants by Pohl & Kornbluth.
- electronsoup 6mo agoAt what point does spanish internet become too unreliable? There was a thread the other day about someone's CI jobs failing due too this.
- avereveard 6mo agowhen connected health device cause a death I guess
- calgoo 6mo agoNo really.... more so when some giant multinational that is bribing (lobbying is just legalized bribes, lets use the real word for it) the politicians start to loose money. Then an exception will be made for them, and they will continue. What they really want is for Cloudflare and others to give in and police it for them.
- worldsayshi 6mo agoWhat kind of health devices require reliable internet connection to prevent death?
- cj 6mo agoCertain medical devices have remote monitoring. You won't die without internet, but your doctor might not receive updates from the device.
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- em500 6mo agoI sure hope connected health device makers include some generous tolerance for network outages.
- deleted 6mo ago
- jwr 6mo agoThis is incredibly stupid, but don't laugh at Spaniards: your (and my) lawmakers are equally likely to enact similarly stupid laws. It's mind-boggling how stupid the world can be sometimes.
- abirch 6mo agoThey pass stupid laws with impunity here in America. Sadly, an alien viewing our behavior would deduce a rule such as: as long as the voter is the same tribe as the candidate, the voter must vote for candidate no matter how corrupt.
- keybored 6mo agoIf they pass laws “with impunity” you can’t blame the voters that hard.
- tl 6mo agoThis is America. We gerrymander the vote and blame the victim. Sorry you got downvoted.
- b65e8bee43c2ed0 6mo agothe voters don't vote on issues, and there are no consequences for breaking campaign promises. and direct democracy is le bad, of course (since Brexit).
- tialaramex 6mo agoDirect Democracy is bad because even if people were capable of doing the hard work to actually decide on coherent trade-offs, for which there is precious little evidence, they do not have time which means we should hire a few people to do that hard work, and that's what an Indirect Democracy is.
- AlBugdy 6mo agoI think direct democracy is bad for a couple of reasons (some are probably rephrased versions of another reason): * not everyone can be an expert on everything; * people can't know what they're not sufficiently knowledgeable about; * people would like to vote (if it was quick and easy) for anything they have even the slightest opinion on; * people could be manipulated much easier than an expert or than an educated representative influenced by experts would; * people value their voice and opinion and themselves too much; * only a minority of people would vote on lots of things, skewing the results; a majority would vote on just a few issues; * education fucking sucks everywhere - people don't have enough information about different topics, they don't know how to get said info, how to analyze it or how to filter trash or spam; * people passionate enough about something will vote on it much more than people not passionate enough about it - with the caveat that someone can be passionate "for X" but not that passionate "against X" - which can lead to the phrasing of the question deciding who will vote; * it would be easier to bribe someone to vote on something they don't care about (or don't realize they care about) - you wouldn't vote for a new supreme leader but might vote for a specific change in laws about metallurgical unions (gave it as an example as I know nothing about the topic so I "don't care" about it). If people were educated, had critical thinking, knew how to spot manipulation, weren't greedy and were able to think about abstract things, direct democracy might work. But people aren't, don't, don't, aren't and aren't.
- lousken 6mo agoTime to block your gov sites as well
- crises-luff-6b 6mo ago[dead]
- VenezuelaFree 6mo agoShould also block themselves from dubbing stuff into spanish, they are horrible, thanks god southamerica has many talented spanish dubbers
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- anthk 6mo agoDon't let me start on your 'neutral' dub where everything reminds me on either Cantinflas or El Chavo.
- loloquwowndueo 6mo agoRegional accents are a thing and stuff like Argentinian Candy Candy or Cuban Mazinger Z are totally childhood-defining.
- anthk 6mo agoIronically I never watched Dragon Ball in Castillian Spanish but for the OVA's. I've watched the series in Basque long before the Spanish dub ever existed (the Basque one was from 1990) and yes, the manga was a perfect 100% translation, so most of the Latin American memes about dubs don't apply to me.
- rapnie 6mo agoOnce you dub, you can't stop. I'm glad Netherlands doesn't do dubbing. Helps general foreign language profiency, I suppose, and near every Dutch person speaks English quite reasonably.
- Paratoner 6mo agoI never understood this attitude from native speakers towards their own language. I am a fresh NL citizen, and have struggled SO MUCH to assimilate into society largely due to this prevalent mentality of "dutch sux actually, we can all speak english amirite guys??" its so bafflingly self-destructive to your own culture. But go off I guess.
- neilv 6mo agoToo bad the article isn't paywalled, or it could be a moment to have a talk about HN's own standard-operating-procedure piracy. When it comes to piracy and anti-piracy, there is greed and stupidity on all sides.
- lionkor 6mo agoI can't feel bad when the subscription circumvention uses the same method they use to get their stuff to rank high in search results. News pages want their content indexed, so they can pull a bait and switch.
- hollow-moe 6mo agoI'm starting to thing the final goal is just to stop "the world" so watching the advertisements with a side of sports is the only thing left to do lmao, wonder how they'll justify banning reading during matches.
- Tabular-Iceberg 6mo ago[flagged]
- cm2012 6mo agoWell, Spain was a dictatorship as recently as 1975.
- oscarcp 6mo agoGentle reminder that we have a gag law that subtly undermines the right to strike as well as give full and total power to police to do whatever they want if they deem your actions a "disrespect" or "disobedience" without giving explanation to anyone.
- Tabular-Iceberg 6mo agoAnd the subsequent PSOE admins show precisely why Spain had to be a dictatorship.
- pjmlp 6mo agoNow they only have to spread all games across the full week, to make it even better. /s
- tracker1 6mo agoXKCD needs a new comic release, replacing "compiling" to "sports"... https://xkcd.com/303/ https://xkcd.com/303/
- nradov 6mo agoIt's always hilarious to see HN users claim how the "quality of life" is so much better in the EU than the USA. When in reality most of them only ever visit a handful of EU first-tier cities for short vacations or business trips, and never have to deal with the reality of living and working under an oppressive bureaucratic state.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- embedding-shape 6mo agoI'd trade "not being able to access Cloudflare-websites for some hours per week" over "My neighbors can't afford healthcare, there is no public transport for anyone nor can I walk to a cafe on the other side of town", but we all have different priorities :) Don't get me wrong, it sucks, makes no sense and I hate the responsible people for it, but in the grand scheme of things, Spain does have a higher quality of life than so many other places out in the world, most important, way higher than the country you're comparing it to, on almost any useful metric.
- bot403 6mo agoOr you can have all of those things but also not block cloudflare. Because blocking cloudflare is in the interest of just a few company's profits and is unrelated to everything else you mentioned.
- embedding-shape 6mo agoYes, sure, as mentioned, I agree with that it's fucking stupid, but when someone complains about that, while referring to "quality of life" in a place which more depends on other things, it's worth to zoom out a bit and gain some perspective, which was frankly missing in the comment I was responding to.
- nradov 6mo agoNah, I didn't miss anything. I've spent enough time in the EU (including the poorer parts that most tourists don't visit) to have a crystal clear perspective on the real situation.
- llbbdd 6mo agoAssuming that "piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem" is still the prevailing wisdom, what is Spain / La Liga doing wrong that sports piracy is so prevalent as to warrant this? It seems like a no-brainer to expand stream availability and charge appropriately for it vs. scheduling daily kneecaps of other economic activity.
- estebank 6mo agoLaLiga has the same kind of attitude and culture as the RIAA. Interpret their words and actions accordingly.
- llbbdd 6mo agoThat's kind of what I mean. From like 2000-2010 in the US, you could find Napster or Limewire icons on the desktops of people who would self-describe as not-a-computer-person. Conveniences like iTunes->iPod and streaming services like Spotify did a lot to depress the popularity of music piracy for a decade+ after that, though it seems to have made a bit of a comeback recently, apparently as a result of streaming services losing licensing rights and generally tightening the belts on their services. You could almost argue that the RIAA's (abhorrent, yes) behavior created the vacuum for new services that competed with piracy legally. I don't know much about them but it seems like part of the problem might be that LaLiga is acting both as the distributor and enforcer? e.g. Universal Music Group might be among the RIAA members, but that doesn't stop UMG from having a distribution relationship with Spotify if it benefits them more to capture those sales directly vs. depending on the RIAA to be a legal watchdog. If all LaLiga has to do is lean on existing infrastructure to block sites that bother them, they'd seem to have no similar incentive to provide better paid service.
- embedding-shape 6mo ago> From like 2000-2010 in the US, you could find Napster or Limewire icons on the desktops of people who would self-describe as not-a-computer-person. Which, just to add some context, is exactly how people/groups who want to watch football at home does with football streams today in 2026 in Spain, except now also with a VPN of course. Regular football fans who have no idea how/why these streams work or where they're coming from and couldn't tell you the difference between a website and a desktop application, know the website addresses and the know-to about how to access them. Which is why you're seeing the reaction from La Liga and the courts. > problem might be that LaLiga is acting both as the distributor and enforcer? Isn't this true in movies and other areas too? HBO and other distributors send DMCA requests left and right like everyone else, as far as I can tell, aren't they too then "the distributor and enforcer" or is that different somehow?
- whalesalad 6mo agoThis is what we call throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
- ilaksh 6mo agoCan Spaniards work around this with a VPN? I know that causes other issues though. To what degree is it feasible for a startup to move around in Europe? This is the sort of heavy-handed, tech-illiterate, authoritarian activity that might make me seriously consider moving my infrastructure or headquarters if I was a Spanish startup.
- alfonsodev 6mo agoI did manage with Cloudflare's WARP, now is called Cloudflare One [1] because the 1.1.1.1 DNS - [1]https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/team-and-resources/devices/cloudflare-one-client/download/ https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/team-and-re...
- gonzalohm 6mo agoYes, that's the funny thing, the people that want to pirate sports are still unaffected. In fact, one of the most famous pages to pirate soccer matches doesn't get blocked during this lockdowns
- alfonsodev 6mo agoIPs are blocked at Spanish internet provider level, the problem would be if you have customers in Spain, but it doesn't matter where you move your infra, if your ip is in one of the affected IP blocks, customers from Spain won't be able to reach no matter in what country is placed (what happened with docker pull )
- ciberado 6mo agoMy Tailscale exit node disagrees ;)
- alfonsodev 6mo agodo you mind to elaborate ? are you connecting from out of Spain, I'm curious how fucked up the situation is.
- 0x_rs 6mo agoSeems obvious at this point there needs to be EU-level regulations against individual countries, such as Spain and Italy, implementing these absurd restrictions. It would at least make lobbying from those sports companies more difficult. These same companies have been pushing for banning VPNs -- consumer VPNs -- as they easily circumvent half the internet going dark because of some dumb sports event, and they're going to be targeted next when everyone's using them. It doesn't help "piracy" always ends up being an excellent excuse to undermine everyone's privacy.
- conradfr 6mo agoThe EU is more likely to enact more censorship than other way.
- vaylian 6mo agoThis. The chat control 2.0 law includes blocking orders. And Ursula von der Leyen tried to introduce internet censorship when she was still in German politics.
- isodev 6mo agoYou’re forgetting the EU is composed of people elected and appointed by member countries. If you don’t like certain policies - contact your MEPs and express your views. Also go vote during your next election. It’s called a democracy for a reason.
- vaylian 6mo agoI'm not forgetting that. > and appointed by member countries [..] Also go vote during your next election That's an important detail. I had no chance to vote against Zensursula.
- storus 6mo agoThat's oversimplification. EU is composed of people vetted by lobbyist/old money groups, elected and approved by member countries. Their primary allegiance is not to the voter.
- smashah 6mo agoif they were serious about stopping piracy, they'd ban computers outright.
- bitwize 6mo agoThat's coming. The death knell is sounding for general purpose computing in the developed world. And nothing can be done about it.
- JoshTriplett 6mo ago> And nothing can be done about it. Don't give up so easily.
- Draiken 6mo agoPeople won't revolt even for genocide so why would they do anything about their computers? We'll pay the subscription and be done with it. Those who can't will suffer. We live too comfortably and independently to risk it all for the thousands of paper-cuts eroding our lives. The capitalists learned from history: isolate us and change into the dystopia little by little and there will never be enough resistance. GP's right in pointing that out even if it hurts to read it.
- rwyinuse 6mo agoIf I ever start watching football, I'll make sure to pirate every match. FIFA, La Liga, they all seem utterly rotten to me.
- krelian 6mo agoIt will take years before the effect will be felt but I do believe since watching football has become so expensive younger generations are going to watch less of it.
- embedding-shape 6mo ago> but I do believe since watching football has become so expensive younger generations are going to watch less of it. Every now and then we go out to watch some of the finals for the national (Spanish) team, and the audience most of the time lean young still today in 2026, although of course it's very mixed more depending on the bar/restaurant you go to rather than the football itself. Even if the subscription prices are expensive today, affording 4 EUR for two beers during a game in a bar is affordable even to teenagers.
- lostlogin 6mo agoIf you think FIFA is rotten, remember their Peace Prize. ‘Rotten’ isn’t a strong enough insult.
- mariuolo 6mo agoJust how much money is in all that?
- musha68k 6mo agoAre people on the streets or is this some Franco-Pavlovian reflex kicking in? Net neutrality used to be a pillar of the EU internet. 2026; the mind fucking boggles.
- calgoo 6mo agoIts football, so no people are not in the streets, they are watching tv.
- swiftcoder 6mo agoFrom this perspective, I kind of think that expanding the bans to golf and movie releases is a good thing - orders of magnitude less people partake in either of those, and so will start to feel the pain of their internet going down too...
- einpoklum 6mo agoThe page claims that the streaming of these sports events 'jams' the Internet in Spain. I am guessing that's just a bogus excuse, and that doesn't even happen; am I wrong?
- lifestyleguru 6mo agoEvery time just around the time I forget how much I hate football, these fucks come up out of nowhere with something exceptionally corrupted and remind me that they still exist.
- utopiah 6mo agoFWIW there are tools specifically to test the impact. I hope to read reports from https://ooni.org https://ooni.org soon.
- bubblethink 6mo agoNews like this makes you realize that these countries have just given up entirely on the idea of progress or innovation. Peak tourist town mentality.
- connorboyle 6mo ago> The announcement speaks of blocking domains, URLs and IP addresses, the latter of which affects legitimate services if the addresses belong to CDN services such as Cloudflare. > La información habla tanto de bloqueos de dominios, URLs y de direcciones IP, caso este último que, cuando se produce, afecta a servicios legítimos si se trata de direcciones pertenecientes a servicios CDN como Cloudflare. Another casualty of the centralized internet of our time
- joshmn 6mo agoI ran a sports streaming service ("pirated sports streaming service" ?). The US Government said I was making $250k MRR as a solo indie dev (I wasn't, but that's great validation). I'm pretty qualified to talk about this. The shitty part about what Spain is doing is that it punishes its own residents who have nothing to do with piracy. Sports piracy is fundamentally different than music or movie piracy. The Spotify analogy that gets tossed around is wrong. Steam is less wrong but still wrong. Music piracy got "solved" because the labels decided that some revenue was better than no revenue, and the math works when you have a bunch of product in your back pocket that cost you nothing to distribute; gaben made piracy slightly less convenient to those in developed countries. Sports rights are valuable because they're exclusive and because they're live. In the US, there are blackouts around sports: if you're physically located in New York (at least, according to whatever IP address data vendor a platform is using), you're unable to watch the New York Knicks using league-sanctioned products. That's the US version of this—restricting access to the content itself to protect the rights holder's revenue. It's internal logic and fundamentally sound (though infuriating) if you're one of them. This is without a doubt categorically worse. A blackout says "you can't watch this game" and Spain is saying "you can't access the internet while this game is on, whether you're interested in the game or not." It's as if the NBA convinced the DOJ to shut down half the internet every time a game was on, just in case. Before it was DMCA notices (useless) -> lawsuits (whack-a-mole, check TorrentFreak) -> ??? -> infrastructure-level blocking. (I'm an outlier for many reasons but we won't go into those.) Each step is more destructive and less effective than the one preceding it. Spain has reached the end of the playbook, thanks to political interests: ban the internet! Fans are the product. La Liga's real customer is Movistar, who pays roughly a billion euros a year for exclusivity so they can bundle it into packages nobody would pay for otherwise. The IP blocking isn't an anti-piracy measure—I'd argue there is no such thing as anti-piracy but that's a different thread. The IP blocking is a signal to the next bidder: the government will protect your exclusivity at any cost, even if that cost is the country's internet.
- tencentshill 6mo agoIt is really €200/month? At what point is it cheaper to buy transportation and a ticket to see events in person?
- giantg2 6mo agoThis is how greed works. The players want as much money as they can get. The owners want to charge as much as they can for everything while paying the least possible amount. The networks that buy the broadcasting and other rights want to most they can charge for them. Sports have gotten way out of hand, even without the betting aspect. People criticize gambling, porn, and other less desirable forms of entertainment while giving (commercialized) sports a free pass. It's not that different when you really get into it at this point.
- IAmGraydon 6mo ago>This is how greed works. The players want as much money as they can get. The owners want to charge as much as they can for everything while paying the least possible amount. The networks that buy the broadcasting and other rights want to most they can charge for them. And the buyer wants to pay as little as they possibly can. That's not greed. That's called a market and it's functioning as it should.
- tossandthrow 6mo agoThere is only a market if there is a commodity. La Liga is not a commodity as I can not equally make a La Liga. This is the basis for antitrust regulations. So no, there is not market. And as such there is no markets that functions as it should.
- IAmGraydon 6mo agoAbsolutely incorrect. A market is just any structure, place, or mechanism that allows buyers and sellers to exchange goods, services, information, or assets. There can be one seller and many buyers, one buyer and many sellers, or anything in between.
- tossandthrow 6mo agoIf I go to your stall and coercively take a product you want 1000 tokens for, but only leave 10 tokens. Then it is still a market? It certainly fits the definition you present. Inwould argue that price discovery is a bit part of a market. Again, these things are already codified. Eg. Wash trades, insider trading, etc.
- yapyap 6mo agoyikes
- elcapitan 6mo agoThe internet was a mistake anyway, they should just ban it completely and be done with it.
- embedding-shape 6mo agoIronically, I live in Spain, and at this very minute, there is a football game going on (Atlético Madrid vs Barcelona) which I literally just learned about because I could just hear my neighbors scream about the 0-1 score, and with Vodafone ISP I'm not experiencing the block of Cloudflare right now. https://hayahora.futbol/ https://hayahora.futbol/ also shows "NO" incorrectly (if you're being strict about the title+domain). I'm guessing it's specifically because it isn't a La Liga game, it's UEFA Champions League. At least ISPs aren't indiscriminately blocking things without court orders, which seems to have been specifically about La Liga.
- pier25 6mo ago> I'm guessing it's specifically because it isn't a La Liga game, it's UEFA Champions League Probably just a matter of time. The article mentions: "Lo bloqueos aplicarán "todos los días de emisión de eventos deportivos en directo", arrancando por primera vez con el partido de eliminatoria de la Champions League entre el Atlético de Madrid y el Barcelona que se celebra hoy martes 14 de abril."
- iamzenitraM 6mo agoThe site tracks not football matches, but when blocks occur, and, right now, there are not any. (The whole joke about the site is trying to detect football happening via internet blocks, as otherwise myself personally I wouldn't know at all otherwise about matches happening)
- embedding-shape 6mo agoYes, I'm aware of what joke the website tried to make, I was trying to explain how the "joke name" ("Is there football on right now?" in English, in case it wasn't clear) didn't quite make sense, because of the blocks only affecting La Liga games.
- nitrat3 6mo agoThis is partly good because it forces development of ways to bypass this censorship. Perhaps the frog is being boiled but the frog will learn to jump.
- artyom 6mo agoIf you know Spain, you know this makes total sense: - Half the country or more just doesn't work or do anything else when there's an important match anyway. - There's a big intersection between "people that doesn't care about soccer" and "people that knows how to use a VPN" - Matches are usually at night, past 7pm. It's well after the average citizen work hours. - There's not really huge internet companies there that can lobby the other way around (e.g. infrastructure collapse because of the block). So in short, the ruling is incredibly stupid because they're allowed to do so, save for the vocal minority, the vast majority of the population doesn't care: they're watching the match.
- nubinetwork 6mo ago> they're watching the match Isn't that part of the problem? Foot egg is so ingrained into the countrymen that nothing else matters. There wouldn't be so much of a forced monopoly if more people would stop watching games and stand up to laliga.
- gravatron 6mo ago[flagged]
- nubinetwork 6mo agoComplaining on the internet every time laliga shuts down github etc isn't going to change anything, we can't solve your problems, the change has to come from within.
- artyom 6mo agoAnd that's how greed ends up destroying itself. They can easily get away with soccer because everyone is glued to the match. Tennis? Eh. Golf? No way.
- joquarky 6mo agoFoot egg? I thought we were talking about soccer.
- littlecranky67 6mo agoQuick reminder, it is not LaLiga (the football association) taking court action, but Telefónica the telco provider. In Spain their brand is Movistar, in UK and Germany more commonly known as O2. So there is something we, the consumer, can do - avoid all products Telefónica, in Spain and elsewhere to express the want for a free and uncensored internet.
- messh 6mo agoIt doesn't solve recording and uploading later... say a movie. So how does it even make sense?
- fluoridation 6mo agoGames are time-sensitive events. Most people who care don't want to watch the game once it's finished, they want to watch it live.
- danayfm 6mo agoYou can bypass this censorship with Starlink. Starlink does not block access like spanish ISPs
- Cider9986 6mo agoOr a VPN for a tenth of the price.
- dpoloncsak 6mo agoAny word on if Starlink is being forced to comply? They have ISPs blocking DNS requests iirc, seems like Starlink may be a viable alternative? Not that you should have to find a new ISP due to soccer being pirated too much, just wondering really Edit: Oh...seems VPNs work. That's probably much easier as a work-around
- dzhiurgis 6mo agoOh man, if there was one way to win Spaniard commie hearts for Elon is to solve sports streaming.
- ronsor 6mo ago"Spain to block the internet 24/7" Please do. I want to see the result on the GDP.
- swiftcoder 6mo agoLook, I'd be more supportive of this sort of thing if it worked - pirated futbol streams are rampant despite the blocking. And the blast radius often is the entire devstack. Last weekend they blocked Cloudflare and GitHub simultaneously.
- iamzenitraM 6mo agoOh hi HN, I'm one of the folks behind https://hayahora.futbol https://hayahora.futbol, we monitor the blocks via a varying set of homelab infrastructure to at least try to make a bit more transparent when they occur and what gets blocked (which isn't public, and we have to guess). Feel free to AMA!
- littlecranky67 6mo agoThanks for the website, really usefull - hopefully it will save me quite some time I am trying to debug a network issue on another sunday afternoon! My question is - as someone on a sibling thread pointed out - it just showed "NO" while the champions league Madrid game was on. And that match is particularly mentioned in the above news article as to be the first match where these new changes come into effect. So were there no blocks, or did they change blocking scope? Or is it just a measuring issue, perhaps?
- iamzenitraM 6mo agoThey just did not block anything today, the YES/NO is based on some frontend logic about the amount of IPs being blocked over multiple ISPs. The enforcement and exactitude of these blocks is pretty sloppy on their end so, despite the news today, I wouldn't be surprised if it takes them a bit longer to start blocking during these matches.
- Levitz 6mo agoWill you guys update the site if what OP talks about ends up taking effect? I guess that at that point the domain name would be a bit out of place.
- iamzenitraM 6mo agoMaybe, although I don't think a lot of blocks will happen about anything other than different kinds of football. Given their following in Spain and the market I'd expect much more rampant piracy on F1 or MotoGP much sooner than... golf? which likely has a very very niche following in comparison. Surprising they didn't puruse about either of both, maybe because of different rightholders in the middle.
- wartywhoa23 6mo agoJust another instance of think global, act local. Whatever can be lapped up by any given nation as an excuse, will be used as such to advocate the crackdown on that nation's right to access the information freely. Think about children, grandma, national security, sovereignity, economy, minorities, tennis, golf, copyright, solar flares, aliens, Keter-class objects, climate change, CO₂, fill your goto excuse in.
- foo12bar 6mo agoOfftopic, but after clicking on this story and going to google news, my feed is flooded with all kinds of sports articles, whereas before there were none. A grim reminder that google does track you all over the internet.
- btown 6mo agoAre there any ways in Cloudflare to mitigate against this? If all sports matches basically mean "our clients can't access our Cloudflare backed app in Spain" then it's worse than fewer-nines; it's a correlated event that could disrupt things like travel checkins, etc. - and it's a hard pitch to say "Cloudflare costs us money and it has no solution for its network putting our Spanish arrivals at risk."
- mgilroy 6mo agoOne of the issues is that you can't watch what you want on one paid for service. I would happily watch my football team play on the telly if I could watch all the games for a reasonable price. However, you can't pay to watch all the games from a single service and you generally have to sign up for a prolonged period or pay significantly more than I'm willing to pay to watch the game if I've got the time. The reality is that the value that the media companies place on watching a game on telly is significantly higher than the value I get from watching a game. I understand that others place a higher value on being able to watch a match or any other sport. I don't. Paying hundreds of euro or pounds per season to attend a match is one thing. I accept that paying for police stewards and ambulances cost a lot of money. Paying the same to watch some games across multiple companies is of no interest to me. Let me watch all my teams games for a tenth the cost of a season ticket and I'll probably pay.
- krzyk 6mo agoAny summary in English? My translation service doesn't give good results.
- dwedge 6mo agoI'm torn on this. It should go through the courts, but the fact is that cloudflare are providing access to illegal content and not doing anything about it. Spain 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 Spain 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
- rcarmo 6mo agoThese people are going to make Docker (and many other infrastructure-related sites) unusable for companies in Spain. Going to be fun to watch their lobby burn down when their companies stop operating during matches.
- nemoniac 6mo agoFinland was the first country to grant its citizens the right to internet access in law. Other countries including Spain have laws "ensuring that access is broadly available and preventing unreasonable restrictions." Something has to give. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_Internet_access#Ensuring_that_access_is_broadly_available_and_preventing_unreasonable_restrictions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_Internet_access#Ensur...