Comment by dkh
9 months ago
While massive overreach in the name of fighting piracy it's very on-brand for LaLiga, this seems pretty wild, even for them. I can't help but wonder if perhaps they didn't realize quite how many unrelated, legitimate sites/services that their citizens use would be affected by this.
I think burns/jokes about Cloudflare are missing the point. It's not about Cloudflare, it's about the millions of people in Spain who couldn't access a plethora of legitimate, unrelated websites and services because of the block. The block included things like Redsys, a major payments processor used by tons of ecommerce sites in Spain.
Piracy or not, you shouldn't be able to get away with this kind of collateral damage, blocking an entire population from accessing a far greater number legitimate websites.
And while I do understand their problems with piracy, LaLiga's view on the matter has always been so over-the-top and reminiscent of the false logic the record companies did in the early 2000s: LaLiga believe (or at least say, all the time) that every euro's worth of football that is pirated is a euro that has been stolen from them; that if piracy didn't exist, they would have that much more money. It's simply not the case. It's a hugely outdated viewpoint, and they shouldn't be able to cause damage to the public because of their adherence to it.
> It's not about Cloudflare, it's about the millions of people in Spain who couldn't access a plethora of legitimate, unrelated websites and services because of the block.
I happen to agree that La Liga wildly overreaching is on brand. But I think this is partly about Cloudflare.
What's happening is a reminder of how centralised the internet is becoming. If blocking Cloudflare IPs brings down big chunks of the internet for Spain, that's a problem. Cloudflare could go down for a while, or collapse permanently, or get compromised.
Putting aside my opinions on La Liga overreach, it will also be a problem if companies get to say to courts "Oh, well, if you block those IPs the internet goes down for your country, so let us know what you want to block and maybe we'll get around to it."
Cloudflare might get a resolution from the court that suits them in the short-term. But drawing this to government attention might not suit them in the long run.
> Putting aside my opinions on La Liga overreach, it will also be a problem if companies get to say to courts "Oh, well, if you block those IPs the internet goes down for your country, so let us know what you want to block and maybe we'll get around to it."
On the contrary, it would be an excellent outcome if the Internet became all-or-nothing, and countries could either choose to provide Internet access or block the entire Internet, with zero ability to selectively block things they don't like.
Doing that via a few centralized CDNs would be bad. Doing that at the protocol level would be excellent.
So... you don't agree with the existence of laws? And differing jurisdictions?
10 replies →
I think the comments here about cloudflare aren't trying to justify what LaLiga is doing, just pointing out that cloudflare does the same equally wrong thing ultimately. If you've ever ended up with an IP cloudflare decided is suspect for one reason or another, have fun being stuck in endless captcha loops all day for something like 70% of the websites you visit, with no recourse
They want cloudflare deal with pirated issue for them
Sure it's blunt. But I guess it will be rather effective in getting Cloudflare to urgently revise their policy on copyright violation.