Comment by rock_artist
4 days ago
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.
> Spanish citizens have control over eh Spanish government.
The fact is LaLiga has more.. It's been that way for years. There was a case where they would (may still do) use the microphone on your phone via the laLiga app to hear if you were watching a match and correlate that with licensed venues.
They're the most aggressive I've ever seen, and their influence in the government is unmatched.
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> 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.
Citizens of other countries have less influence on the Spanish government than Spanish citizens? Not surprising.
> Freedom is impotent,
Did you meant to say important?
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".
That extreme centralization makes the single choke-point vulnerable to all kinds of other problems. The web is supposed to be decentralized and distributed.
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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
Some 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?
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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.
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Not 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.
Is it football or handegg?