Comment by JoshTriplett
14 hours ago
LaLiga wanted the right to tell Cloudflare to block specific sites without going through a court.
Cloudflare, rightfully, said that was ridiculous and unreasonable.
A Spanish court, wrongfully, decided to let LaLiga block all of Cloudflare.
I assume the problem is Cloudflare wants a court order that mentions the specific infringing domain name. The problem is: what's faster, spinning up a new frontend for a livestream or getting an order from a court?
Courts orders are, rightfully, slow. A court order is a serious thing and we shouldn't be wasting judges' time and resources to determine if hundreds of domains in CloudFlare, during every single match, are infringing on LaLiga. This is why the Spanish ISPs have a fast-lane with LaLiga to block infringing websites quickly. Why is it ridiculous and unreasonable? If LaLiga starts abusing this power to attack competitors or do anything malicious they will lose that power instantly.
Fastly understood the problem and will start running detection software to ban infringing livestreams in real time. https://www.laliga.com/en-GB/news/fastly-and-laliga-team-up-...
What's CF's solution?
> If LaLiga starts abusing this power to attack competitors or do anything malicious they will lose that power instantly.
Because everything demonstrated so far has suggested that LaLiga is reasonable and measured? Courts exist for many reasons, among them that we do not trust plaintiffs to always be right or reasonable.
By way of demonstrating that such power is unacceptable, it sounds like LaLiga is also trying to get Spanish ISPs to block all VPNs whenever a game is on.
This is not an entity that can be trusted with power. This is an entity that rightfully should take its whining to a court who can keep its abuses in check. (Unfortunately, the Spanish courts also don't seem willing to keep its abuses in check, which brings us back to the collateral damage problem.)
> Fastly understood the problem
No, Fastly accepted the blackmail that Cloudflare refused.
>By way of demonstrating that such power is unacceptable, it sounds like LaLiga is also trying to get Spanish ISPs to block all VPNs whenever a game is on.
What LaLiga did was get some VPN providers (NordVPN and ProtonVPN) to start blocking pirate streaming websites. They're not trying to block VPNs themselves unless there's other news I didn't find.
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