Spain’s LaLiga has blocked access to freedom.gov

2 months ago (twitter.com)

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.

      5 replies →

  • 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”

    • 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".

      7 replies →

    • 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

      5 replies →

  • 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.

    • > 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.

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.

    • 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".

    • 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.

    • 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.

  • 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.

      30 replies →

    • 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.

  • 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.

FWIW, 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.

  • 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.

    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.

    • > 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.

      2 replies →

Ignoring 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.

Perhaps Europe should put up a portal to bypass American copyright restrictions. Free speech, and all that.

  • Copyright 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.

    • That'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.

      6 replies →

No 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.

That 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.

It'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.

Are they restreaming football?

Whe 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.

No 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.

if 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?

I 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.

  • It 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.

  • The site was created for the express purpose of enabling bypass of sovereign policy decisions: so yeah, it's going to be blocked.

    • It'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.

US ISPs would do the same if the EU started hosting the unredacted Epstein files.

Good. freedom.gov is a clear subversive political influence campaign that should be banned by all European countries.

  • It is basically just a proxy. I don't see how censorship could be an antidote to a "subversive political influence campaign" - if anything you're describing censorship

    • Censoring foreign political influence and misinformation campaigns is just sane policy.

      US misinformation is no different from Russian misinformation. freedom.gov is specifically meant to spread this misinfo, freedom of speech is the stated purpose, but if you believe that, you are naive.

      This is obviously an influence campaign.

      21 replies →

    • It's just an empty landing page I never heard about before. (Accessed from Europe by the way, without block)

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