Ask HN: What can I do to fight internet censorship in Spain as a non-EU citizen?
5 months ago
Thanks to a recent court order [1], and in an effort to "prevent piracy", La Liga (the Spanish football league) has ordered major ISPs in Spain to block access to IP ranges belonging to CDNs during football events. [2]
Since this measure is imposed on ISPs by court order, I understand that complaining to them as an ordinary customer would be ineffective. As a non-EU citizen, is there anything I can do to push back against this kind of restriction on internet freedom?
Currently I've configured my home router to use mosdns [3] to rewrite DNS answers in the Cloudflare IP ranges to known-good addresses (e.g., chatgpt.com, medium.com). This works for now but will eventually be defeated by SNI-based blocking, which some ISPs are already doing.
[1]: https://vercel.com/blog/update-on-spain-and-laliga-blocks-of-the-internet [2]: https://hayahora.futbol/ [3]: https://github.com/IrineSistiana/mosdns
It’s hard to know how to fight this new culture of censorship. It began back in 2016 when social media platforms like Twitter really became aggressive with their moderation, which basically became censorship. Now we have countries blocking websites and requiring age verification and knocking on people’s doors for online posts. It’s everywhere, not just in authoritarian countries like China but virtually all democracies. Maybe less so in the US but certainly all over Europe. It’ll take big cultural change and a new younger wave of politicians to move away from this.
Absolutely true. 100%. Step 1 should be a cut-off age of 40 for being a politician, and a strong 2 term limit for both politicians and political parties.
This is not an age issue, despite looking like one. This is a matter of agressive lobbying, and putting tons of cash on the case. Major ISPs also offer sports (football) subscriptions, so they are also interested in applying the block.
40? Do you happen to be 18-25? I ask, rhetorically, because when I was that age, I thought 40 was old. Now, I'm 30, and 40 seems a bit younger than it did +10 years ago.
I do agree that there should be a cut-off age, though.
If you're not a EU citizen, that makes you not a spain citizen right? My understanding there's some weird edge cases here? But if you're not spanish. Then who are you to judge the democratic will of the spanish people? If you dont like it, move out of spain? Dont live and contribute to a society you so fundamentally disagree.
I would go further. I dont think Spain is going to collapse anymore. The previous administrations nearly ran it into the ground, and there's repairs ongoing. Back in 2019-2021, oh man Spain was looking like goners.
> Then who are you to judge the democratic will of the spanish people?
First of all, that’s literally what democracy is about, judging and expressing opinions. Even if you're a non-citizen. Secondly, how do you know the “Spanish people” (as in, the voting population) support this law? Was there a referendum or something?
This is not our democratic will. This is the result of the league and the ISPs lobbying very agressively in favour of the blocks.
Everyone is welcome to speak against them :)
Spin up a vps in a different country, and VPN your entire traffic over this vps. Wireguard or OpenVPN.