Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times
shevy-java
So what does this mean in english?
loupol
Even more hours where people in Spain will have to wonder why their online apps/services are not working anymore I suppose.
mmh0000
Context, a few days ago, this was a very popular article on HN:
Tell HN: Docker pull fails in Spain due to football Cloudflare block
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47738883
TL;DR: Spain blocks A LOT of CDNs during footy matches, including ALL of Cloudflare, thus breaking most of the internet. All in the name of stopping "pirates".
avalenn
Main ISP in Spain dynamically blocks IP it suspects sharing sport competition live streams. Began with football, now extended to other sports.
Impact on legitimate traffic is real.
Basically, to combat pirate streaming of football matches, La Liga (the Spanish football association) can compel Spanish ISPs to block wide ranges of IP blocks that are suspected of hosting those streams.
This includes Cloudflare, which - due to lots of websites depending on them (see what happened when they went down last year: https://blog.cloudflare.com/18-november-2025-outage/ ) feels like half of the internet is unusable. This happens weekly when football is on.
Now it looks like those bans are going to become even more frequent, which will have all kinds of unintended consequences.
applfanboysbgon
File "selling out your country's communication infrastructure to people filming other people kicking a ball around" under things science fiction writers failed to predict about capitalist dystopias.
smallmancontrov
Hey, that FIFA Peace Prize won't pay for itself!
wiml
You may enjoy the 1952 novel The Space Merchants by Pohl & Kornbluth.
amarant
Wtf? Just the other day I had chat about how stupid this is: they're blocking cloudflare to stop pirates!
So half the internet goes down, but pirates just.. Don't use cloudflare anymore.. Or use a proxy... Or use tor...
These policies cause nothing but collateral damage, and now apparently they've decided to cause some more of it!
Good job Spain.
otterley
CloudFlare loves pirates so much that they disclose loss of DMCA safe harbor protections as a material business risk on all their SEC filings. Piracy friendliness is key to their business model. It’s a risky position that no other large-scale CDN is willing to take.
Forcing piracy consumers to use Tor or other proxies is unlikely to be popular. They’ll still be used, for sure, but so long as CF makes pirated content easily accessible over the Internet, this is just going to keep happening. It’s just too damned convenient.
I don’t believe CF is going to win here, long term. If Spain and other countries block their ASNs, enough of their legitimate paying customers may start abandoning ship, and CF will have to get serious about unplugging notorious proxy configurations for piracy origin servers.
jwr
This is incredibly stupid, but don't laugh at Spaniards: your (and my) lawmakers are equally likely to enact similarly stupid laws. It's mind-boggling how stupid the world can be sometimes.
abirch
They pass stupid laws with impunity here in America.
Sadly, an alien viewing our behavior would deduce a rule such as: as long as the voter is the same tribe as the candidate, the voter must vote for candidate no matter how corrupt.
wahnfrieden
It describes hierarchy and power more than it does intelligence
themafia
> how stupid the world can be
This isn't stupidity. It's corruption.
josu
>enact similarly stupid laws.
No new law was enacted. The ISPs are enforcing a court order.
lousken
Time to block your gov sites as well
crises-luff-6b
[dead]
VenezuelaFree
Should also block themselves from dubbing stuff into spanish, they are horrible, thanks god southamerica has many talented spanish dubbers
anthk
Don't let me start on your 'neutral' dub where everything reminds me on either Cantinflas or El Chavo.
rapnie
Once you dub, you can't stop. I'm glad Netherlands doesn't do dubbing. Helps general foreign language profiency, I suppose, and near every Dutch person speaks English quite reasonably.
mihaelm
Subtitles all the way. Only advantages of dubbing I can see is accessibility for vision impaired and employment opportunity for local VA talent.
But dubbed live action media is such a horrid experience for me.
nslsm
Yes yes, Spain sucks a lot. Please stay in Venezuela, well away of our awfulness.
debugnik
Vice versa for most Spaniard opinions on South American Spanish dubs.
Being objective, both sides of the pond have produced many shitty Spanish dubs and some good ones, and unless there's too much difference for a given series we all just prefer our native dub.
neilv
Too bad the article isn't paywalled, or it could be a moment to have a talk about HN's own standard-operating-procedure piracy.
When it comes to piracy and anti-piracy, there is greed and stupidity on all sides.
lionkor
I can't feel bad when the subscription circumvention uses the same method they use to get their stuff to rank high in search results. News pages want their content indexed, so they can pull a bait and switch.
Tabular-Iceberg
[flagged]
cm2012
Well, Spain was a dictatorship as recently as 1975.
oscarcp
Gentle reminder that we have a gag law that subtly undermines the right to strike as well as give full and total power to police to do whatever they want if they deem your actions a "disrespect" or "disobedience" without giving explanation to anyone.
hollow-moe
I'm starting to thing the final goal is just to stop "the world" so watching the advertisements with a side of sports is the only thing left to do lmao, wonder how they'll justify banning reading during matches.
pjmlp
Now they only have to spread all games across the full week, to make it even better. /s
tracker1
XKCD needs a new comic release, replacing "compiling" to "sports"...
It's always hilarious to see HN users claim how the "quality of life" is so much better in the EU than the USA. When in reality most of them only ever visit a handful of EU first-tier cities for short vacations or business trips, and never have to deal with the reality of living and working under an oppressive bureaucratic state.
applfanboysbgon
As stupid and terrible as this is, this is certainly a lesser evil compared to minimal worker's rights, non-existent public transportation, no legally guaranteed parental leave/vacation/sick time, paying tens of thousands of dollars for healthcare, a ~5x+ higher violent crime rate, wasting billions of taxpayer money on sending missiles into schools while infrastructure crumbles, etc. etc. A country does not need to be perfect to have higher quality of life than the US, that's for sure.
embedding-shape
I'd trade "not being able to access Cloudflare-websites for some hours per week" over "My neighbors can't afford healthcare, there is no public transport for anyone nor can I walk to a cafe on the other side of town", but we all have different priorities :)
Don't get me wrong, it sucks, makes no sense and I hate the responsible people for it, but in the grand scheme of things, Spain does have a higher quality of life than so many other places out in the world, most important, way higher than the country you're comparing it to, on almost any useful metric.
estebank
> never have to deal with the reality of living and working under an oppressive bureaucratic state.
I see that you have never had to deal with the US government.
tokai
In other news NY is working on banning air guns that are not transparent or brightly colored and have plugged barrels. Yes plugged, making them useless.
Which oppressive bureaucratic state are we talking about again?
stackghost
The USA consistently ranks outside the top 10 countries in Quality of Life by any reputable metric.
rwyinuse
Well, there are lots of EU countries where governments aren't as idiotic as that of Spain, and where bureaucracy is mostly under control as well.
As a citizen of a Nordic country I would never want to live in America, except maybe if I was rich. Especially for people with children my country offers a superior quality of life in many ways.
anonzzzies
Rage bait as it is; please stay over there in the US, I will stay here in Spain. I will live with this 'opression' that I have to read about on HN to notice. All good!
hnlmorg
Having worked in both the US and EU, I can tell you the quality of life is vastly better in the EU.
US does have some perks for sure. But there are so many issues of its own and those issues are almost always pushed downwards to the most vulnerable groups. Which means, on average, you do end up with a better quality of life outside the US.
oytis
Conversely, most Europeans praising the USA have mostly been to California or New York, and rarely to Ohio or Alabama
anthk
The HOA, the ICE, 1984 like scans in the airports even as a tourist, lack of basic healthcare...
Yeah, you live in the paradise...
llbbdd
Assuming that "piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem" is still the prevailing wisdom, what is Spain / La Liga doing wrong that sports piracy is so prevalent as to warrant this? It seems like a no-brainer to expand stream availability and charge appropriately for it vs. scheduling daily kneecaps of other economic activity.
estebank
LaLiga has the same kind of attitude and culture as the RIAA. Interpret their words and actions accordingly.
torben-friis
Football in Spain is usually sold by what used to be cable tv (now a mix of cable + Netflix-like streaming). Usually to get access to matches you need the most expensive package, which includes a bajillion services and might even be tied to a cell/internet provider. Footbal is their "killer feature" that enables 200 euro subscriptions.
They also sell "business access", so pubs can show the match, since going to the bar for a beer is the go-to choice for those who can't afford to watch at home.
raincole
> "piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem"
I never buy into this. If copyright law doesn't exist, pirate sites will eventually always provide better service than the official channels.
One example is scanlation manga. Chinese scanlation sites have reached the theoretical ceiling of service: just serve images fast with a little nonintrusive ad. No login required. No way the official Japanese apps can provide significant better service than that.
opengrass
Piracy is for teenagers and poor people.
bix6
Is it not a pricing problem? Spotify is relatively cheap and has all the music. For the same video coverage I need 5+ streaming services that all increase prices significantly faster than inflation. This is just private equity over squeezing?
mrtksn
This seems like they are aiming to increase profit margins instead of increasing the supply and decreasing the price. Considering that increasing the supply is trivial in digital products, maybe they are competing in a saturated market?
Spaniards attitudes can be quite different from the American ones, Americans just pay for everything for convenience, in Spain you probably need to match the price of the IPTV to steal their customers.
Apparently IPTV costs 20 to 60 Euros per year, the legal option is over 100 euros per month.
To match the IPTV they need 20x price reduction. This would mean that they need sign in 20x more Spaniards to break even with the current situation. Are there 20x more Spaniards pirating the LaLiga than paying? Even in Spain I don’t think so.
Manuel_D
Piracy isn't a service problem. Many people just want to consume media for free. It's true that poor service can exacerbate piracy, but even a good service isn't enough to dissuade pirates. Games that are completely convenient to download on Steam are still pirated.
Some people are pushed to pirate on account of bad service, sure. But plenty of others are more than willing to tolerate worse service to receive a product for free.
Aurornis
> Assuming that "piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem" is still the prevailing wisdom
I don't have experience with broadcast media (in Spain, especially) but I a little experience on the software side: I could not believe the lengths some people would go to in order to avoid paying even $5-10 for useful software. Hours of work, sketchy cracks, downloading things from websites likely to compromise their system. Some of them would become irate when the software was updated and broke their cracks, spending time complaining loudly on forums and social media or even trying to threaten developers. The strangest part is when they start posting from social media where you can see things like their $3,000 gaming PC build, but if they see a chance to avoid paying $10-20 for something they will take it.
It becomes culturally embedded in some bubbles: If it's possible to find a way to avoid paying and there are no consequences for trying, some people will go for it.
I don't even buy the "it's a service problem" argument either. I have a friend who loves to watch sports games but refused to pay for any services. He will spend 30 minutes jumping from one website to the next enduring crazy amounts of ads, pop-ups, and attempts to get him to install things on his computer until finally getting to a blocky stream that drops out every few minutes. He can easily afford to pay, but getting things without paying is basically a little game he likes to play.
pfortuny
Monopoly: It is not just "LaLiga" who stands to lose money, it is Telefonica/Movistar which is the only owner of most of sports right in Spain, and they know they can set the price they want because
+ Most people are not savy enough to pirate/are unwilling to do it for fear.
+ The more fear they instil, the keener those people are to pay.
+ Most bars where it is available will rise prices to sustain their loss. It starts at 300Eu/(month screen) (notice the product in the denominator), and having.
+ Woe to you if you own a bar and the police get you pirating. Woe indeed, the fine will be unimaginable...
Monopoly does this to the markets. Movistar (Telefonica) is the de-facto owner of high-stakes sports in Spain. This means Football (Spanish league, Champions League), Tennis (all the Masters and Grand Slams), Basketball, you name it.
They are also the main telco in Spain, so they own the service and the channel.
nish__
They don't stream on YouTube.
walletdrainer
It’s very easy to watch pirated streams, it’s insanely complicated to reliably watch the official streams.
whalesalad
This is what we call throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
electronsoup
At what point does spanish internet become too unreliable? There was a thread the other day about someone's CI jobs failing due too this.
avereveard
when connected health device cause a death I guess
toast0
Eh, if they block things when every sport or any movie is being shown, it will be reliable. Reliably blocked. :P
oscarcp
There was a case two weeks ago about someone unable to locate their missing parent with a tracking application (I'm assuming the parent has some sort of dementia) because the application could not connect to the servers. Link in spanish https://hipertextual.com/actualidad/los-bloqueos-de-laliga-e...
ilaksh
Can Spaniards work around this with a VPN? I know that causes other issues though.
To what degree is it feasible for a startup to move around in Europe? This is the sort of heavy-handed, tech-illiterate, authoritarian activity that might make me seriously consider moving my infrastructure or headquarters if I was a Spanish startup.
alfonsodev
I did manage with Cloudflare's WARP, now is called Cloudflare One [1] because the 1.1.1.1 DNS
Yes, that's the funny thing, the people that want to pirate sports are still unaffected. In fact, one of the most famous pages to pirate soccer matches doesn't get blocked during this lockdowns
alfonsodev
IPs are blocked at Spanish internet provider level, the problem would be if you have customers in Spain, but it doesn't matter where you move your infra, if your ip is in one of the affected IP blocks, customers from Spain won't be able to reach no matter in what country is placed (what happened with docker pull )
alfonsodev
> This is the sort of heavy-handed, tech-illiterate, authoritarian.
Totally agree with this, it's ridiculous and a shame.
I personally don't use any infrastructure provider from Spain, but you wouldn't solve any problem moving out, and also those providers are not the ones to blame or punish. Only customer connecting from Spain are affected where is the infrastructure does not solve the problem.
InfraScaler
Yes, works with any VPN.
Also, it takes 10 minutes to find a valid football stream, even without a VPN. Such is life.
bluecalm
I spend a lot of time every year in Spain.
VPNs work but sometimes you are forget about those Internet outages and are wondering why some services suddenly stop working. Some of them stop working in mysterious ways as well (for example if they host just some resources on Cloudflare).
It's frankly ridiculous because it's very easy to use a VPN and stream w/e anyway. I don't watch football, tennis or golf but I use VPN regularly to watch Australian TV.
0x_rs
Seems obvious at this point there needs to be EU-level regulations against individual countries, such as Spain and Italy, implementing these absurd restrictions. It would at least make lobbying from those sports companies more difficult. These same companies have been pushing for banning VPNs -- consumer VPNs -- as they easily circumvent half the internet going dark because of some dumb sports event, and they're going to be targeted next when everyone's using them. It doesn't help "piracy" always ends up being an excellent excuse to undermine everyone's privacy.
conradfr
The EU is more likely to enact more censorship than other way.
petcat
> there need to be EU-level regulations against individual countries, such as Spain and Italy, implementing these absurd restrictions
Why should other EU members care what websites Spain allows their citizens to access? Does the "EU" even have authority for such a thing?
cedws
The EU is in favour of this kind of rubbish, as is the UK. We need to kick these idiots out of power.
redsocksfan45
[dead]
isodev
I would say the root problem is not someone seeking to prevent piracy but rather the fact that so many services are clustered behind the same proxy / CDN service (e.g. Cloudflare).
That in my view is what needs to be regulated and Cloudflare designated as a “gatekeeper” with all the responsibilities to go with that.
La Liga would never be able to secure blanket bans if people and services were more decentralised
MrArthegor
[dead]
buzer
> Seems obvious at this point there needs to be EU-level regulations against individual countries, such as Spain and Italy, implementing these absurd restrictions.
I don't think there is EU-level "regulation" in this specific thing. However there is something somewhat better: European Convention on Human Rights. It's just that challenging these kind of bans via that route is very slow (similar how slow it is to challenge the laws which go against the Constitution in the US via Supreme Court).
Squarex
As a europe federalist, I would think it is more likely EU would implement these restrictions itself instead of step against Spain.
smashah
if they were serious about stopping piracy, they'd ban computers outright.
bitwize
That's coming. The death knell is sounding for general purpose computing in the developed world. And nothing can be done about it.
rwyinuse
If I ever start watching football, I'll make sure to pirate every match. FIFA, La Liga, they all seem utterly rotten to me.
krelian
It will take years before the effect will be felt but I do believe since watching football has become so expensive younger generations are going to watch less of it.
lostlogin
If you think FIFA is rotten, remember their Peace Prize.
‘Rotten’ isn’t a strong enough insult.
mariuolo
Just how much money is in all that?
oscarcp
Normalized revenue for LaLiga itself in 2025 was 5.4 billion (american billion) euros
scotty79
Probably not that much, but it's money of influential people, so the rest must suffer.
musha68k
Are people on the streets or is this some Franco-Pavlovian reflex kicking in?
Net neutrality used to be a pillar of the EU internet. 2026; the mind fucking boggles.
calgoo
Its football, so no people are not in the streets, they are watching tv.
einpoklum
The page claims that the streaming of these sports events 'jams' the Internet in Spain. I am guessing that's just a bogus excuse, and that doesn't even happen; am I wrong?
lifestyleguru
Every time just around the time I forget how much I hate football, these fucks come up out of nowhere with something exceptionally corrupted and remind me that they still exist.
utopiah
FWIW there are tools specifically to test the impact. I hope to read reports from https://ooni.org soon.
bubblethink
News like this makes you realize that these countries have just given up entirely on the idea of progress or innovation. Peak tourist town mentality.
connorboyle
> The announcement speaks of blocking domains, URLs and IP addresses, the latter of which affects legitimate services if the addresses belong to CDN services such as Cloudflare.
> La información habla tanto de bloqueos de dominios, URLs y de direcciones IP, caso este último que, cuando se produce, afecta a servicios legítimos si se trata de direcciones pertenecientes a servicios CDN como Cloudflare.
Another casualty of the centralized internet of our time
joshmn
I ran a sports streaming service ("pirated sports streaming service" ?). The US Government said I was making $250k MRR as a solo indie dev (I wasn't, but that's great validation). I'm pretty qualified to talk about this.
The shitty part about what Spain is doing is that it punishes its own residents who have nothing to do with piracy.
Sports piracy is fundamentally different than music or movie piracy. The Spotify analogy that gets tossed around is wrong. Steam is less wrong but still wrong. Music piracy got "solved" because the labels decided that some revenue was better than no revenue, and the math works when you have a bunch of product in your back pocket that cost you nothing to distribute; gaben made piracy slightly less convenient to those in developed countries.
Sports rights are valuable because they're exclusive and because they're live. In the US, there are blackouts around sports: if you're physically located in New York (at least, according to whatever IP address data vendor a platform is using), you're unable to watch the New York Knicks using league-sanctioned products. That's the US version of this—restricting access to the content itself to protect the rights holder's revenue. It's internal logic and fundamentally sound (though infuriating) if you're one of them.
This is without a doubt categorically worse. A blackout says "you can't watch this game" and Spain is saying "you can't access the internet while this game is on, whether you're interested in the game or not." It's as if the NBA convinced the DOJ to shut down half the internet every time a game was on, just in case.
Before it was DMCA notices (useless) -> lawsuits (whack-a-mole, check TorrentFreak) -> ??? -> infrastructure-level blocking. (I'm an outlier for many reasons but we won't go into those.) Each step is more destructive and less effective than the one preceding it. Spain has reached the end of the playbook, thanks to political interests: ban the internet!
Fans are the product. La Liga's real customer is Movistar, who pays roughly a billion euros a year for exclusivity so they can bundle it into packages nobody would pay for otherwise. The IP blocking isn't an anti-piracy measure—I'd argue there is no such thing as anti-piracy but that's a different thread. The IP blocking is a signal to the next bidder: the government will protect your exclusivity at any cost, even if that cost is the country's internet.
tencentshill
It is really €200/month? At what point is it cheaper to buy transportation and a ticket to see events in person?
giantg2
This is how greed works. The players want as much money as they can get. The owners want to charge as much as they can for everything while paying the least possible amount. The networks that buy the broadcasting and other rights want to most they can charge for them.
Sports have gotten way out of hand, even without the betting aspect. People criticize gambling, porn, and other less desirable forms of entertainment while giving (commercialized) sports a free pass. It's not that different when you really get into it at this point.
IAmGraydon
>This is how greed works. The players want as much money as they can get. The owners want to charge as much as they can for everything while paying the least possible amount. The networks that buy the broadcasting and other rights want to most they can charge for them.
And the buyer wants to pay as little as they possibly can. That's not greed. That's called a market and it's functioning as it should.
balamatom
The ones who pirate the sports broadcasts are in the right. Spectator sports are literally brainwashing: they hook into vestigial tribal instincts, reinforce them, and channel them for political goals - such as norm-setting, or extrajudicial violence.
Anyone who genuinely likes kickball because they derive exquisite pleasure from watching balls being kicked, can go watch it live. But no, it just has to reach right into people's living rooms, at the cost of disrupting productive activity. Imagine if people paid such enthusiastic attention to things that were not about "winning" and "losing" some completely imaginary competition. Imagine how much better their lives would've been!
yapyap
yikes
elcapitan
The internet was a mistake anyway, they should just ban it completely and be done with it.
embedding-shape
Ironically, I live in Spain, and at this very minute, there is a football game going on (Atlético Madrid vs Barcelona) which I literally just learned about because I could just hear my neighbors scream about the 0-1 score, and with Vodafone ISP I'm not experiencing the block of Cloudflare right now. https://hayahora.futbol/ also shows "NO" incorrectly (if you're being strict about the title+domain). I'm guessing it's specifically because it isn't a La Liga game, it's UEFA Champions League. At least ISPs aren't indiscriminately blocking things without court orders, which seems to have been specifically about La Liga.
pier25
> I'm guessing it's specifically because it isn't a La Liga game, it's UEFA Champions League
Probably just a matter of time. The article mentions:
"Lo bloqueos aplicarán "todos los días de emisión de eventos deportivos en directo", arrancando por primera vez con el partido de eliminatoria de la Champions League entre el Atlético de Madrid y el Barcelona que se celebra hoy martes 14 de abril."
tverbeure
Yeah, because I totally have control over who’s dubbing movies in France.
nitrat3
This is partly good because it forces development of ways to bypass this censorship.
Perhaps the frog is being boiled but the frog will learn to jump.
lxgr
Or somebody will put a lid on the pot.
artyom
If you know Spain, you know this makes total sense:
- Half the country or more just doesn't work or do anything else when there's an important match anyway.
- There's a big intersection between "people that doesn't care about soccer" and "people that knows how to use a VPN"
- Matches are usually at night, past 7pm. It's well after the average citizen work hours.
- There's not really huge internet companies there that can lobby the other way around (e.g. infrastructure collapse because of the block).
So in short, the ruling is incredibly stupid because they're allowed to do so, save for the vocal minority, the vast majority of the population doesn't care: they're watching the match.
littlecranky67
Quick reminder, it is not LaLiga (the football association) taking court action, but Telefónica the telco provider. In Spain their brand is Movistar, in UK and Germany more commonly known as O2. So there is something we, the consumer, can do - avoid all products Telefónica, in Spain and elsewhere to express the want for a free and uncensored internet.
messh
It doesn't solve recording and uploading later... say a movie. So how does it even make sense?
danayfm
You can bypass this censorship with Starlink. Starlink does not block access like spanish ISPs
dpoloncsak
Any word on if Starlink is being forced to comply? They have ISPs blocking DNS requests iirc, seems like Starlink may be a viable alternative?
Not that you should have to find a new ISP due to soccer being pirated too much, just wondering really
Edit: Oh...seems VPNs work. That's probably much easier as a work-around
shevy-java
So what does this mean in english?
loupol
Even more hours where people in Spain will have to wonder why their online apps/services are not working anymore I suppose.
mmh0000
Context, a few days ago, this was a very popular article on HN:
Tell HN: Docker pull fails in Spain due to football Cloudflare block
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47738883
TL;DR: Spain blocks A LOT of CDNs during footy matches, including ALL of Cloudflare, thus breaking most of the internet. All in the name of stopping "pirates".
avalenn
Main ISP in Spain dynamically blocks IP it suspects sharing sport competition live streams. Began with football, now extended to other sports.
Impact on legitimate traffic is real.
Basically, to combat pirate streaming of football matches, La Liga (the Spanish football association) can compel Spanish ISPs to block wide ranges of IP blocks that are suspected of hosting those streams.
This includes Cloudflare, which - due to lots of websites depending on them (see what happened when they went down last year: https://blog.cloudflare.com/18-november-2025-outage/ ) feels like half of the internet is unusable. This happens weekly when football is on.
Now it looks like those bans are going to become even more frequent, which will have all kinds of unintended consequences.
applfanboysbgon
File "selling out your country's communication infrastructure to people filming other people kicking a ball around" under things science fiction writers failed to predict about capitalist dystopias.
smallmancontrov
Hey, that FIFA Peace Prize won't pay for itself!
wiml
You may enjoy the 1952 novel The Space Merchants by Pohl & Kornbluth.
amarant
Wtf? Just the other day I had chat about how stupid this is: they're blocking cloudflare to stop pirates!
So half the internet goes down, but pirates just.. Don't use cloudflare anymore.. Or use a proxy... Or use tor...
These policies cause nothing but collateral damage, and now apparently they've decided to cause some more of it!
Good job Spain.
otterley
CloudFlare loves pirates so much that they disclose loss of DMCA safe harbor protections as a material business risk on all their SEC filings. Piracy friendliness is key to their business model. It’s a risky position that no other large-scale CDN is willing to take.
Forcing piracy consumers to use Tor or other proxies is unlikely to be popular. They’ll still be used, for sure, but so long as CF makes pirated content easily accessible over the Internet, this is just going to keep happening. It’s just too damned convenient.
I don’t believe CF is going to win here, long term. If Spain and other countries block their ASNs, enough of their legitimate paying customers may start abandoning ship, and CF will have to get serious about unplugging notorious proxy configurations for piracy origin servers.
jwr
This is incredibly stupid, but don't laugh at Spaniards: your (and my) lawmakers are equally likely to enact similarly stupid laws. It's mind-boggling how stupid the world can be sometimes.
abirch
They pass stupid laws with impunity here in America.
Sadly, an alien viewing our behavior would deduce a rule such as: as long as the voter is the same tribe as the candidate, the voter must vote for candidate no matter how corrupt.
wahnfrieden
It describes hierarchy and power more than it does intelligence
themafia
> how stupid the world can be
This isn't stupidity. It's corruption.
josu
>enact similarly stupid laws.
No new law was enacted. The ISPs are enforcing a court order.
lousken
Time to block your gov sites as well
crises-luff-6b
[dead]
VenezuelaFree
Should also block themselves from dubbing stuff into spanish, they are horrible, thanks god southamerica has many talented spanish dubbers
anthk
Don't let me start on your 'neutral' dub where everything reminds me on either Cantinflas or El Chavo.
rapnie
Once you dub, you can't stop. I'm glad Netherlands doesn't do dubbing. Helps general foreign language profiency, I suppose, and near every Dutch person speaks English quite reasonably.
mihaelm
Subtitles all the way. Only advantages of dubbing I can see is accessibility for vision impaired and employment opportunity for local VA talent.
But dubbed live action media is such a horrid experience for me.
nslsm
Yes yes, Spain sucks a lot. Please stay in Venezuela, well away of our awfulness.
debugnik
Vice versa for most Spaniard opinions on South American Spanish dubs.
Being objective, both sides of the pond have produced many shitty Spanish dubs and some good ones, and unless there's too much difference for a given series we all just prefer our native dub.
neilv
Too bad the article isn't paywalled, or it could be a moment to have a talk about HN's own standard-operating-procedure piracy.
When it comes to piracy and anti-piracy, there is greed and stupidity on all sides.
lionkor
I can't feel bad when the subscription circumvention uses the same method they use to get their stuff to rank high in search results. News pages want their content indexed, so they can pull a bait and switch.
Tabular-Iceberg
[flagged]
cm2012
Well, Spain was a dictatorship as recently as 1975.
oscarcp
Gentle reminder that we have a gag law that subtly undermines the right to strike as well as give full and total power to police to do whatever they want if they deem your actions a "disrespect" or "disobedience" without giving explanation to anyone.
hollow-moe
I'm starting to thing the final goal is just to stop "the world" so watching the advertisements with a side of sports is the only thing left to do lmao, wonder how they'll justify banning reading during matches.
pjmlp
Now they only have to spread all games across the full week, to make it even better. /s
tracker1
XKCD needs a new comic release, replacing "compiling" to "sports"...
It's always hilarious to see HN users claim how the "quality of life" is so much better in the EU than the USA. When in reality most of them only ever visit a handful of EU first-tier cities for short vacations or business trips, and never have to deal with the reality of living and working under an oppressive bureaucratic state.
applfanboysbgon
As stupid and terrible as this is, this is certainly a lesser evil compared to minimal worker's rights, non-existent public transportation, no legally guaranteed parental leave/vacation/sick time, paying tens of thousands of dollars for healthcare, a ~5x+ higher violent crime rate, wasting billions of taxpayer money on sending missiles into schools while infrastructure crumbles, etc. etc. A country does not need to be perfect to have higher quality of life than the US, that's for sure.
embedding-shape
I'd trade "not being able to access Cloudflare-websites for some hours per week" over "My neighbors can't afford healthcare, there is no public transport for anyone nor can I walk to a cafe on the other side of town", but we all have different priorities :)
Don't get me wrong, it sucks, makes no sense and I hate the responsible people for it, but in the grand scheme of things, Spain does have a higher quality of life than so many other places out in the world, most important, way higher than the country you're comparing it to, on almost any useful metric.
estebank
> never have to deal with the reality of living and working under an oppressive bureaucratic state.
I see that you have never had to deal with the US government.
tokai
In other news NY is working on banning air guns that are not transparent or brightly colored and have plugged barrels. Yes plugged, making them useless.
Which oppressive bureaucratic state are we talking about again?
stackghost
The USA consistently ranks outside the top 10 countries in Quality of Life by any reputable metric.
rwyinuse
Well, there are lots of EU countries where governments aren't as idiotic as that of Spain, and where bureaucracy is mostly under control as well.
As a citizen of a Nordic country I would never want to live in America, except maybe if I was rich. Especially for people with children my country offers a superior quality of life in many ways.
anonzzzies
Rage bait as it is; please stay over there in the US, I will stay here in Spain. I will live with this 'opression' that I have to read about on HN to notice. All good!
hnlmorg
Having worked in both the US and EU, I can tell you the quality of life is vastly better in the EU.
US does have some perks for sure. But there are so many issues of its own and those issues are almost always pushed downwards to the most vulnerable groups. Which means, on average, you do end up with a better quality of life outside the US.
oytis
Conversely, most Europeans praising the USA have mostly been to California or New York, and rarely to Ohio or Alabama
anthk
The HOA, the ICE, 1984 like scans in the airports even as a tourist, lack of basic healthcare...
Yeah, you live in the paradise...
llbbdd
Assuming that "piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem" is still the prevailing wisdom, what is Spain / La Liga doing wrong that sports piracy is so prevalent as to warrant this? It seems like a no-brainer to expand stream availability and charge appropriately for it vs. scheduling daily kneecaps of other economic activity.
estebank
LaLiga has the same kind of attitude and culture as the RIAA. Interpret their words and actions accordingly.
torben-friis
Football in Spain is usually sold by what used to be cable tv (now a mix of cable + Netflix-like streaming). Usually to get access to matches you need the most expensive package, which includes a bajillion services and might even be tied to a cell/internet provider. Footbal is their "killer feature" that enables 200 euro subscriptions.
They also sell "business access", so pubs can show the match, since going to the bar for a beer is the go-to choice for those who can't afford to watch at home.
raincole
> "piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem"
I never buy into this. If copyright law doesn't exist, pirate sites will eventually always provide better service than the official channels.
One example is scanlation manga. Chinese scanlation sites have reached the theoretical ceiling of service: just serve images fast with a little nonintrusive ad. No login required. No way the official Japanese apps can provide significant better service than that.
opengrass
Piracy is for teenagers and poor people.
bix6
Is it not a pricing problem? Spotify is relatively cheap and has all the music. For the same video coverage I need 5+ streaming services that all increase prices significantly faster than inflation. This is just private equity over squeezing?
mrtksn
This seems like they are aiming to increase profit margins instead of increasing the supply and decreasing the price. Considering that increasing the supply is trivial in digital products, maybe they are competing in a saturated market?
Spaniards attitudes can be quite different from the American ones, Americans just pay for everything for convenience, in Spain you probably need to match the price of the IPTV to steal their customers.
Apparently IPTV costs 20 to 60 Euros per year, the legal option is over 100 euros per month.
To match the IPTV they need 20x price reduction. This would mean that they need sign in 20x more Spaniards to break even with the current situation. Are there 20x more Spaniards pirating the LaLiga than paying? Even in Spain I don’t think so.
Manuel_D
Piracy isn't a service problem. Many people just want to consume media for free. It's true that poor service can exacerbate piracy, but even a good service isn't enough to dissuade pirates. Games that are completely convenient to download on Steam are still pirated.
Some people are pushed to pirate on account of bad service, sure. But plenty of others are more than willing to tolerate worse service to receive a product for free.
Aurornis
> Assuming that "piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem" is still the prevailing wisdom
I don't have experience with broadcast media (in Spain, especially) but I a little experience on the software side: I could not believe the lengths some people would go to in order to avoid paying even $5-10 for useful software. Hours of work, sketchy cracks, downloading things from websites likely to compromise their system. Some of them would become irate when the software was updated and broke their cracks, spending time complaining loudly on forums and social media or even trying to threaten developers. The strangest part is when they start posting from social media where you can see things like their $3,000 gaming PC build, but if they see a chance to avoid paying $10-20 for something they will take it.
It becomes culturally embedded in some bubbles: If it's possible to find a way to avoid paying and there are no consequences for trying, some people will go for it.
I don't even buy the "it's a service problem" argument either. I have a friend who loves to watch sports games but refused to pay for any services. He will spend 30 minutes jumping from one website to the next enduring crazy amounts of ads, pop-ups, and attempts to get him to install things on his computer until finally getting to a blocky stream that drops out every few minutes. He can easily afford to pay, but getting things without paying is basically a little game he likes to play.
pfortuny
Monopoly: It is not just "LaLiga" who stands to lose money, it is Telefonica/Movistar which is the only owner of most of sports right in Spain, and they know they can set the price they want because
+ Most people are not savy enough to pirate/are unwilling to do it for fear.
+ The more fear they instil, the keener those people are to pay.
+ Most bars where it is available will rise prices to sustain their loss. It starts at 300Eu/(month screen) (notice the product in the denominator), and having.
+ Woe to you if you own a bar and the police get you pirating. Woe indeed, the fine will be unimaginable...
Monopoly does this to the markets. Movistar (Telefonica) is the de-facto owner of high-stakes sports in Spain. This means Football (Spanish league, Champions League), Tennis (all the Masters and Grand Slams), Basketball, you name it.
They are also the main telco in Spain, so they own the service and the channel.
nish__
They don't stream on YouTube.
walletdrainer
It’s very easy to watch pirated streams, it’s insanely complicated to reliably watch the official streams.
whalesalad
This is what we call throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
electronsoup
At what point does spanish internet become too unreliable? There was a thread the other day about someone's CI jobs failing due too this.
avereveard
when connected health device cause a death I guess
toast0
Eh, if they block things when every sport or any movie is being shown, it will be reliable. Reliably blocked. :P
oscarcp
There was a case two weeks ago about someone unable to locate their missing parent with a tracking application (I'm assuming the parent has some sort of dementia) because the application could not connect to the servers. Link in spanish https://hipertextual.com/actualidad/los-bloqueos-de-laliga-e...
ilaksh
Can Spaniards work around this with a VPN? I know that causes other issues though.
To what degree is it feasible for a startup to move around in Europe? This is the sort of heavy-handed, tech-illiterate, authoritarian activity that might make me seriously consider moving my infrastructure or headquarters if I was a Spanish startup.
alfonsodev
I did manage with Cloudflare's WARP, now is called Cloudflare One [1] because the 1.1.1.1 DNS
Yes, that's the funny thing, the people that want to pirate sports are still unaffected. In fact, one of the most famous pages to pirate soccer matches doesn't get blocked during this lockdowns
alfonsodev
IPs are blocked at Spanish internet provider level, the problem would be if you have customers in Spain, but it doesn't matter where you move your infra, if your ip is in one of the affected IP blocks, customers from Spain won't be able to reach no matter in what country is placed (what happened with docker pull )
alfonsodev
> This is the sort of heavy-handed, tech-illiterate, authoritarian.
Totally agree with this, it's ridiculous and a shame.
I personally don't use any infrastructure provider from Spain, but you wouldn't solve any problem moving out, and also those providers are not the ones to blame or punish. Only customer connecting from Spain are affected where is the infrastructure does not solve the problem.
InfraScaler
Yes, works with any VPN.
Also, it takes 10 minutes to find a valid football stream, even without a VPN. Such is life.
bluecalm
I spend a lot of time every year in Spain.
VPNs work but sometimes you are forget about those Internet outages and are wondering why some services suddenly stop working. Some of them stop working in mysterious ways as well (for example if they host just some resources on Cloudflare).
It's frankly ridiculous because it's very easy to use a VPN and stream w/e anyway. I don't watch football, tennis or golf but I use VPN regularly to watch Australian TV.
0x_rs
Seems obvious at this point there needs to be EU-level regulations against individual countries, such as Spain and Italy, implementing these absurd restrictions. It would at least make lobbying from those sports companies more difficult. These same companies have been pushing for banning VPNs -- consumer VPNs -- as they easily circumvent half the internet going dark because of some dumb sports event, and they're going to be targeted next when everyone's using them. It doesn't help "piracy" always ends up being an excellent excuse to undermine everyone's privacy.
conradfr
The EU is more likely to enact more censorship than other way.
petcat
> there need to be EU-level regulations against individual countries, such as Spain and Italy, implementing these absurd restrictions
Why should other EU members care what websites Spain allows their citizens to access? Does the "EU" even have authority for such a thing?
cedws
The EU is in favour of this kind of rubbish, as is the UK. We need to kick these idiots out of power.
redsocksfan45
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isodev
I would say the root problem is not someone seeking to prevent piracy but rather the fact that so many services are clustered behind the same proxy / CDN service (e.g. Cloudflare).
That in my view is what needs to be regulated and Cloudflare designated as a “gatekeeper” with all the responsibilities to go with that.
La Liga would never be able to secure blanket bans if people and services were more decentralised
MrArthegor
[dead]
buzer
> Seems obvious at this point there needs to be EU-level regulations against individual countries, such as Spain and Italy, implementing these absurd restrictions.
I don't think there is EU-level "regulation" in this specific thing. However there is something somewhat better: European Convention on Human Rights. It's just that challenging these kind of bans via that route is very slow (similar how slow it is to challenge the laws which go against the Constitution in the US via Supreme Court).
Squarex
As a europe federalist, I would think it is more likely EU would implement these restrictions itself instead of step against Spain.
smashah
if they were serious about stopping piracy, they'd ban computers outright.
bitwize
That's coming. The death knell is sounding for general purpose computing in the developed world. And nothing can be done about it.
rwyinuse
If I ever start watching football, I'll make sure to pirate every match. FIFA, La Liga, they all seem utterly rotten to me.
krelian
It will take years before the effect will be felt but I do believe since watching football has become so expensive younger generations are going to watch less of it.
lostlogin
If you think FIFA is rotten, remember their Peace Prize.
‘Rotten’ isn’t a strong enough insult.
mariuolo
Just how much money is in all that?
oscarcp
Normalized revenue for LaLiga itself in 2025 was 5.4 billion (american billion) euros
scotty79
Probably not that much, but it's money of influential people, so the rest must suffer.
musha68k
Are people on the streets or is this some Franco-Pavlovian reflex kicking in?
Net neutrality used to be a pillar of the EU internet. 2026; the mind fucking boggles.
calgoo
Its football, so no people are not in the streets, they are watching tv.
einpoklum
The page claims that the streaming of these sports events 'jams' the Internet in Spain. I am guessing that's just a bogus excuse, and that doesn't even happen; am I wrong?
lifestyleguru
Every time just around the time I forget how much I hate football, these fucks come up out of nowhere with something exceptionally corrupted and remind me that they still exist.
utopiah
FWIW there are tools specifically to test the impact. I hope to read reports from https://ooni.org soon.
bubblethink
News like this makes you realize that these countries have just given up entirely on the idea of progress or innovation. Peak tourist town mentality.
connorboyle
> The announcement speaks of blocking domains, URLs and IP addresses, the latter of which affects legitimate services if the addresses belong to CDN services such as Cloudflare.
> La información habla tanto de bloqueos de dominios, URLs y de direcciones IP, caso este último que, cuando se produce, afecta a servicios legítimos si se trata de direcciones pertenecientes a servicios CDN como Cloudflare.
Another casualty of the centralized internet of our time
joshmn
I ran a sports streaming service ("pirated sports streaming service" ?). The US Government said I was making $250k MRR as a solo indie dev (I wasn't, but that's great validation). I'm pretty qualified to talk about this.
The shitty part about what Spain is doing is that it punishes its own residents who have nothing to do with piracy.
Sports piracy is fundamentally different than music or movie piracy. The Spotify analogy that gets tossed around is wrong. Steam is less wrong but still wrong. Music piracy got "solved" because the labels decided that some revenue was better than no revenue, and the math works when you have a bunch of product in your back pocket that cost you nothing to distribute; gaben made piracy slightly less convenient to those in developed countries.
Sports rights are valuable because they're exclusive and because they're live. In the US, there are blackouts around sports: if you're physically located in New York (at least, according to whatever IP address data vendor a platform is using), you're unable to watch the New York Knicks using league-sanctioned products. That's the US version of this—restricting access to the content itself to protect the rights holder's revenue. It's internal logic and fundamentally sound (though infuriating) if you're one of them.
This is without a doubt categorically worse. A blackout says "you can't watch this game" and Spain is saying "you can't access the internet while this game is on, whether you're interested in the game or not." It's as if the NBA convinced the DOJ to shut down half the internet every time a game was on, just in case.
Before it was DMCA notices (useless) -> lawsuits (whack-a-mole, check TorrentFreak) -> ??? -> infrastructure-level blocking. (I'm an outlier for many reasons but we won't go into those.) Each step is more destructive and less effective than the one preceding it. Spain has reached the end of the playbook, thanks to political interests: ban the internet!
Fans are the product. La Liga's real customer is Movistar, who pays roughly a billion euros a year for exclusivity so they can bundle it into packages nobody would pay for otherwise. The IP blocking isn't an anti-piracy measure—I'd argue there is no such thing as anti-piracy but that's a different thread. The IP blocking is a signal to the next bidder: the government will protect your exclusivity at any cost, even if that cost is the country's internet.
tencentshill
It is really €200/month? At what point is it cheaper to buy transportation and a ticket to see events in person?
giantg2
This is how greed works. The players want as much money as they can get. The owners want to charge as much as they can for everything while paying the least possible amount. The networks that buy the broadcasting and other rights want to most they can charge for them.
Sports have gotten way out of hand, even without the betting aspect. People criticize gambling, porn, and other less desirable forms of entertainment while giving (commercialized) sports a free pass. It's not that different when you really get into it at this point.
IAmGraydon
>This is how greed works. The players want as much money as they can get. The owners want to charge as much as they can for everything while paying the least possible amount. The networks that buy the broadcasting and other rights want to most they can charge for them.
And the buyer wants to pay as little as they possibly can. That's not greed. That's called a market and it's functioning as it should.
balamatom
The ones who pirate the sports broadcasts are in the right. Spectator sports are literally brainwashing: they hook into vestigial tribal instincts, reinforce them, and channel them for political goals - such as norm-setting, or extrajudicial violence.
Anyone who genuinely likes kickball because they derive exquisite pleasure from watching balls being kicked, can go watch it live. But no, it just has to reach right into people's living rooms, at the cost of disrupting productive activity. Imagine if people paid such enthusiastic attention to things that were not about "winning" and "losing" some completely imaginary competition. Imagine how much better their lives would've been!
yapyap
yikes
elcapitan
The internet was a mistake anyway, they should just ban it completely and be done with it.
embedding-shape
Ironically, I live in Spain, and at this very minute, there is a football game going on (Atlético Madrid vs Barcelona) which I literally just learned about because I could just hear my neighbors scream about the 0-1 score, and with Vodafone ISP I'm not experiencing the block of Cloudflare right now. https://hayahora.futbol/ also shows "NO" incorrectly (if you're being strict about the title+domain). I'm guessing it's specifically because it isn't a La Liga game, it's UEFA Champions League. At least ISPs aren't indiscriminately blocking things without court orders, which seems to have been specifically about La Liga.
pier25
> I'm guessing it's specifically because it isn't a La Liga game, it's UEFA Champions League
Probably just a matter of time. The article mentions:
"Lo bloqueos aplicarán "todos los días de emisión de eventos deportivos en directo", arrancando por primera vez con el partido de eliminatoria de la Champions League entre el Atlético de Madrid y el Barcelona que se celebra hoy martes 14 de abril."
tverbeure
Yeah, because I totally have control over who’s dubbing movies in France.
nitrat3
This is partly good because it forces development of ways to bypass this censorship.
Perhaps the frog is being boiled but the frog will learn to jump.
lxgr
Or somebody will put a lid on the pot.
artyom
If you know Spain, you know this makes total sense:
- Half the country or more just doesn't work or do anything else when there's an important match anyway.
- There's a big intersection between "people that doesn't care about soccer" and "people that knows how to use a VPN"
- Matches are usually at night, past 7pm. It's well after the average citizen work hours.
- There's not really huge internet companies there that can lobby the other way around (e.g. infrastructure collapse because of the block).
So in short, the ruling is incredibly stupid because they're allowed to do so, save for the vocal minority, the vast majority of the population doesn't care: they're watching the match.
littlecranky67
Quick reminder, it is not LaLiga (the football association) taking court action, but Telefónica the telco provider. In Spain their brand is Movistar, in UK and Germany more commonly known as O2. So there is something we, the consumer, can do - avoid all products Telefónica, in Spain and elsewhere to express the want for a free and uncensored internet.
messh
It doesn't solve recording and uploading later... say a movie. So how does it even make sense?
danayfm
You can bypass this censorship with Starlink. Starlink does not block access like spanish ISPs
dpoloncsak
Any word on if Starlink is being forced to comply? They have ISPs blocking DNS requests iirc, seems like Starlink may be a viable alternative?
Not that you should have to find a new ISP due to soccer being pirated too much, just wondering really
Edit: Oh...seems VPNs work. That's probably much easier as a work-around
So what does this mean in english?
Even more hours where people in Spain will have to wonder why their online apps/services are not working anymore I suppose.
Context, a few days ago, this was a very popular article on HN:
TL;DR: Spain blocks A LOT of CDNs during footy matches, including ALL of Cloudflare, thus breaking most of the internet. All in the name of stopping "pirates".Main ISP in Spain dynamically blocks IP it suspects sharing sport competition live streams. Began with football, now extended to other sports. Impact on legitimate traffic is real.
See this story from 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47738883
Basically, to combat pirate streaming of football matches, La Liga (the Spanish football association) can compel Spanish ISPs to block wide ranges of IP blocks that are suspected of hosting those streams.
This includes Cloudflare, which - due to lots of websites depending on them (see what happened when they went down last year: https://blog.cloudflare.com/18-november-2025-outage/ ) feels like half of the internet is unusable. This happens weekly when football is on.
Now it looks like those bans are going to become even more frequent, which will have all kinds of unintended consequences.
File "selling out your country's communication infrastructure to people filming other people kicking a ball around" under things science fiction writers failed to predict about capitalist dystopias.
Hey, that FIFA Peace Prize won't pay for itself!
You may enjoy the 1952 novel The Space Merchants by Pohl & Kornbluth.
Wtf? Just the other day I had chat about how stupid this is: they're blocking cloudflare to stop pirates!
So half the internet goes down, but pirates just.. Don't use cloudflare anymore.. Or use a proxy... Or use tor...
These policies cause nothing but collateral damage, and now apparently they've decided to cause some more of it!
Good job Spain.
CloudFlare loves pirates so much that they disclose loss of DMCA safe harbor protections as a material business risk on all their SEC filings. Piracy friendliness is key to their business model. It’s a risky position that no other large-scale CDN is willing to take.
Forcing piracy consumers to use Tor or other proxies is unlikely to be popular. They’ll still be used, for sure, but so long as CF makes pirated content easily accessible over the Internet, this is just going to keep happening. It’s just too damned convenient.
I don’t believe CF is going to win here, long term. If Spain and other countries block their ASNs, enough of their legitimate paying customers may start abandoning ship, and CF will have to get serious about unplugging notorious proxy configurations for piracy origin servers.
This is incredibly stupid, but don't laugh at Spaniards: your (and my) lawmakers are equally likely to enact similarly stupid laws. It's mind-boggling how stupid the world can be sometimes.
They pass stupid laws with impunity here in America.
Sadly, an alien viewing our behavior would deduce a rule such as: as long as the voter is the same tribe as the candidate, the voter must vote for candidate no matter how corrupt.
It describes hierarchy and power more than it does intelligence
> how stupid the world can be
This isn't stupidity. It's corruption.
>enact similarly stupid laws.
No new law was enacted. The ISPs are enforcing a court order.
Time to block your gov sites as well
[dead]
Should also block themselves from dubbing stuff into spanish, they are horrible, thanks god southamerica has many talented spanish dubbers
Don't let me start on your 'neutral' dub where everything reminds me on either Cantinflas or El Chavo.
Once you dub, you can't stop. I'm glad Netherlands doesn't do dubbing. Helps general foreign language profiency, I suppose, and near every Dutch person speaks English quite reasonably.
Subtitles all the way. Only advantages of dubbing I can see is accessibility for vision impaired and employment opportunity for local VA talent.
But dubbed live action media is such a horrid experience for me.
Yes yes, Spain sucks a lot. Please stay in Venezuela, well away of our awfulness.
Vice versa for most Spaniard opinions on South American Spanish dubs.
Being objective, both sides of the pond have produced many shitty Spanish dubs and some good ones, and unless there's too much difference for a given series we all just prefer our native dub.
Too bad the article isn't paywalled, or it could be a moment to have a talk about HN's own standard-operating-procedure piracy.
When it comes to piracy and anti-piracy, there is greed and stupidity on all sides.
I can't feel bad when the subscription circumvention uses the same method they use to get their stuff to rank high in search results. News pages want their content indexed, so they can pull a bait and switch.
[flagged]
Well, Spain was a dictatorship as recently as 1975.
Gentle reminder that we have a gag law that subtly undermines the right to strike as well as give full and total power to police to do whatever they want if they deem your actions a "disrespect" or "disobedience" without giving explanation to anyone.
I'm starting to thing the final goal is just to stop "the world" so watching the advertisements with a side of sports is the only thing left to do lmao, wonder how they'll justify banning reading during matches.
Now they only have to spread all games across the full week, to make it even better. /s
XKCD needs a new comic release, replacing "compiling" to "sports"...
https://xkcd.com/303/
It's always hilarious to see HN users claim how the "quality of life" is so much better in the EU than the USA. When in reality most of them only ever visit a handful of EU first-tier cities for short vacations or business trips, and never have to deal with the reality of living and working under an oppressive bureaucratic state.
As stupid and terrible as this is, this is certainly a lesser evil compared to minimal worker's rights, non-existent public transportation, no legally guaranteed parental leave/vacation/sick time, paying tens of thousands of dollars for healthcare, a ~5x+ higher violent crime rate, wasting billions of taxpayer money on sending missiles into schools while infrastructure crumbles, etc. etc. A country does not need to be perfect to have higher quality of life than the US, that's for sure.
I'd trade "not being able to access Cloudflare-websites for some hours per week" over "My neighbors can't afford healthcare, there is no public transport for anyone nor can I walk to a cafe on the other side of town", but we all have different priorities :)
Don't get me wrong, it sucks, makes no sense and I hate the responsible people for it, but in the grand scheme of things, Spain does have a higher quality of life than so many other places out in the world, most important, way higher than the country you're comparing it to, on almost any useful metric.
> never have to deal with the reality of living and working under an oppressive bureaucratic state.
I see that you have never had to deal with the US government.
In other news NY is working on banning air guns that are not transparent or brightly colored and have plugged barrels. Yes plugged, making them useless.
Which oppressive bureaucratic state are we talking about again?
The USA consistently ranks outside the top 10 countries in Quality of Life by any reputable metric.
Well, there are lots of EU countries where governments aren't as idiotic as that of Spain, and where bureaucracy is mostly under control as well.
As a citizen of a Nordic country I would never want to live in America, except maybe if I was rich. Especially for people with children my country offers a superior quality of life in many ways.
Rage bait as it is; please stay over there in the US, I will stay here in Spain. I will live with this 'opression' that I have to read about on HN to notice. All good!
Having worked in both the US and EU, I can tell you the quality of life is vastly better in the EU.
US does have some perks for sure. But there are so many issues of its own and those issues are almost always pushed downwards to the most vulnerable groups. Which means, on average, you do end up with a better quality of life outside the US.
Conversely, most Europeans praising the USA have mostly been to California or New York, and rarely to Ohio or Alabama
The HOA, the ICE, 1984 like scans in the airports even as a tourist, lack of basic healthcare...
Yeah, you live in the paradise...
Assuming that "piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem" is still the prevailing wisdom, what is Spain / La Liga doing wrong that sports piracy is so prevalent as to warrant this? It seems like a no-brainer to expand stream availability and charge appropriately for it vs. scheduling daily kneecaps of other economic activity.
LaLiga has the same kind of attitude and culture as the RIAA. Interpret their words and actions accordingly.
Football in Spain is usually sold by what used to be cable tv (now a mix of cable + Netflix-like streaming). Usually to get access to matches you need the most expensive package, which includes a bajillion services and might even be tied to a cell/internet provider. Footbal is their "killer feature" that enables 200 euro subscriptions.
They also sell "business access", so pubs can show the match, since going to the bar for a beer is the go-to choice for those who can't afford to watch at home.
> "piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem"
I never buy into this. If copyright law doesn't exist, pirate sites will eventually always provide better service than the official channels.
One example is scanlation manga. Chinese scanlation sites have reached the theoretical ceiling of service: just serve images fast with a little nonintrusive ad. No login required. No way the official Japanese apps can provide significant better service than that.
Piracy is for teenagers and poor people.
Is it not a pricing problem? Spotify is relatively cheap and has all the music. For the same video coverage I need 5+ streaming services that all increase prices significantly faster than inflation. This is just private equity over squeezing?
This seems like they are aiming to increase profit margins instead of increasing the supply and decreasing the price. Considering that increasing the supply is trivial in digital products, maybe they are competing in a saturated market?
Spaniards attitudes can be quite different from the American ones, Americans just pay for everything for convenience, in Spain you probably need to match the price of the IPTV to steal their customers.
Apparently IPTV costs 20 to 60 Euros per year, the legal option is over 100 euros per month.
To match the IPTV they need 20x price reduction. This would mean that they need sign in 20x more Spaniards to break even with the current situation. Are there 20x more Spaniards pirating the LaLiga than paying? Even in Spain I don’t think so.
Piracy isn't a service problem. Many people just want to consume media for free. It's true that poor service can exacerbate piracy, but even a good service isn't enough to dissuade pirates. Games that are completely convenient to download on Steam are still pirated.
Some people are pushed to pirate on account of bad service, sure. But plenty of others are more than willing to tolerate worse service to receive a product for free.
> Assuming that "piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem" is still the prevailing wisdom
I don't have experience with broadcast media (in Spain, especially) but I a little experience on the software side: I could not believe the lengths some people would go to in order to avoid paying even $5-10 for useful software. Hours of work, sketchy cracks, downloading things from websites likely to compromise their system. Some of them would become irate when the software was updated and broke their cracks, spending time complaining loudly on forums and social media or even trying to threaten developers. The strangest part is when they start posting from social media where you can see things like their $3,000 gaming PC build, but if they see a chance to avoid paying $10-20 for something they will take it.
It becomes culturally embedded in some bubbles: If it's possible to find a way to avoid paying and there are no consequences for trying, some people will go for it.
I don't even buy the "it's a service problem" argument either. I have a friend who loves to watch sports games but refused to pay for any services. He will spend 30 minutes jumping from one website to the next enduring crazy amounts of ads, pop-ups, and attempts to get him to install things on his computer until finally getting to a blocky stream that drops out every few minutes. He can easily afford to pay, but getting things without paying is basically a little game he likes to play.
Monopoly: It is not just "LaLiga" who stands to lose money, it is Telefonica/Movistar which is the only owner of most of sports right in Spain, and they know they can set the price they want because
+ Most people are not savy enough to pirate/are unwilling to do it for fear.
+ The more fear they instil, the keener those people are to pay.
+ Most bars where it is available will rise prices to sustain their loss. It starts at 300Eu/(month screen) (notice the product in the denominator), and having.
+ Woe to you if you own a bar and the police get you pirating. Woe indeed, the fine will be unimaginable...
Monopoly does this to the markets. Movistar (Telefonica) is the de-facto owner of high-stakes sports in Spain. This means Football (Spanish league, Champions League), Tennis (all the Masters and Grand Slams), Basketball, you name it.
They are also the main telco in Spain, so they own the service and the channel.
They don't stream on YouTube.
It’s very easy to watch pirated streams, it’s insanely complicated to reliably watch the official streams.
This is what we call throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
At what point does spanish internet become too unreliable? There was a thread the other day about someone's CI jobs failing due too this.
when connected health device cause a death I guess
Eh, if they block things when every sport or any movie is being shown, it will be reliable. Reliably blocked. :P
There was a case two weeks ago about someone unable to locate their missing parent with a tracking application (I'm assuming the parent has some sort of dementia) because the application could not connect to the servers. Link in spanish https://hipertextual.com/actualidad/los-bloqueos-de-laliga-e...
Can Spaniards work around this with a VPN? I know that causes other issues though.
To what degree is it feasible for a startup to move around in Europe? This is the sort of heavy-handed, tech-illiterate, authoritarian activity that might make me seriously consider moving my infrastructure or headquarters if I was a Spanish startup.
I did manage with Cloudflare's WARP, now is called Cloudflare One [1] because the 1.1.1.1 DNS
- [1]https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/team-and-re...
Yes, that's the funny thing, the people that want to pirate sports are still unaffected. In fact, one of the most famous pages to pirate soccer matches doesn't get blocked during this lockdowns
IPs are blocked at Spanish internet provider level, the problem would be if you have customers in Spain, but it doesn't matter where you move your infra, if your ip is in one of the affected IP blocks, customers from Spain won't be able to reach no matter in what country is placed (what happened with docker pull )
> This is the sort of heavy-handed, tech-illiterate, authoritarian.
Totally agree with this, it's ridiculous and a shame.
I personally don't use any infrastructure provider from Spain, but you wouldn't solve any problem moving out, and also those providers are not the ones to blame or punish. Only customer connecting from Spain are affected where is the infrastructure does not solve the problem.
Yes, works with any VPN.
Also, it takes 10 minutes to find a valid football stream, even without a VPN. Such is life.
I spend a lot of time every year in Spain. VPNs work but sometimes you are forget about those Internet outages and are wondering why some services suddenly stop working. Some of them stop working in mysterious ways as well (for example if they host just some resources on Cloudflare).
It's frankly ridiculous because it's very easy to use a VPN and stream w/e anyway. I don't watch football, tennis or golf but I use VPN regularly to watch Australian TV.
Seems obvious at this point there needs to be EU-level regulations against individual countries, such as Spain and Italy, implementing these absurd restrictions. It would at least make lobbying from those sports companies more difficult. These same companies have been pushing for banning VPNs -- consumer VPNs -- as they easily circumvent half the internet going dark because of some dumb sports event, and they're going to be targeted next when everyone's using them. It doesn't help "piracy" always ends up being an excellent excuse to undermine everyone's privacy.
The EU is more likely to enact more censorship than other way.
> there need to be EU-level regulations against individual countries, such as Spain and Italy, implementing these absurd restrictions
Why should other EU members care what websites Spain allows their citizens to access? Does the "EU" even have authority for such a thing?
The EU is in favour of this kind of rubbish, as is the UK. We need to kick these idiots out of power.
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I would say the root problem is not someone seeking to prevent piracy but rather the fact that so many services are clustered behind the same proxy / CDN service (e.g. Cloudflare).
That in my view is what needs to be regulated and Cloudflare designated as a “gatekeeper” with all the responsibilities to go with that.
La Liga would never be able to secure blanket bans if people and services were more decentralised
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> Seems obvious at this point there needs to be EU-level regulations against individual countries, such as Spain and Italy, implementing these absurd restrictions.
I don't think there is EU-level "regulation" in this specific thing. However there is something somewhat better: European Convention on Human Rights. It's just that challenging these kind of bans via that route is very slow (similar how slow it is to challenge the laws which go against the Constitution in the US via Supreme Court).
As a europe federalist, I would think it is more likely EU would implement these restrictions itself instead of step against Spain.
if they were serious about stopping piracy, they'd ban computers outright.
That's coming. The death knell is sounding for general purpose computing in the developed world. And nothing can be done about it.
If I ever start watching football, I'll make sure to pirate every match. FIFA, La Liga, they all seem utterly rotten to me.
It will take years before the effect will be felt but I do believe since watching football has become so expensive younger generations are going to watch less of it.
If you think FIFA is rotten, remember their Peace Prize.
‘Rotten’ isn’t a strong enough insult.
Just how much money is in all that?
Normalized revenue for LaLiga itself in 2025 was 5.4 billion (american billion) euros
Probably not that much, but it's money of influential people, so the rest must suffer.
Are people on the streets or is this some Franco-Pavlovian reflex kicking in?
Net neutrality used to be a pillar of the EU internet. 2026; the mind fucking boggles.
Its football, so no people are not in the streets, they are watching tv.
The page claims that the streaming of these sports events 'jams' the Internet in Spain. I am guessing that's just a bogus excuse, and that doesn't even happen; am I wrong?
Every time just around the time I forget how much I hate football, these fucks come up out of nowhere with something exceptionally corrupted and remind me that they still exist.
FWIW there are tools specifically to test the impact. I hope to read reports from https://ooni.org soon.
News like this makes you realize that these countries have just given up entirely on the idea of progress or innovation. Peak tourist town mentality.
> The announcement speaks of blocking domains, URLs and IP addresses, the latter of which affects legitimate services if the addresses belong to CDN services such as Cloudflare.
> La información habla tanto de bloqueos de dominios, URLs y de direcciones IP, caso este último que, cuando se produce, afecta a servicios legítimos si se trata de direcciones pertenecientes a servicios CDN como Cloudflare.
Another casualty of the centralized internet of our time
I ran a sports streaming service ("pirated sports streaming service" ?). The US Government said I was making $250k MRR as a solo indie dev (I wasn't, but that's great validation). I'm pretty qualified to talk about this.
The shitty part about what Spain is doing is that it punishes its own residents who have nothing to do with piracy.
Sports piracy is fundamentally different than music or movie piracy. The Spotify analogy that gets tossed around is wrong. Steam is less wrong but still wrong. Music piracy got "solved" because the labels decided that some revenue was better than no revenue, and the math works when you have a bunch of product in your back pocket that cost you nothing to distribute; gaben made piracy slightly less convenient to those in developed countries.
Sports rights are valuable because they're exclusive and because they're live. In the US, there are blackouts around sports: if you're physically located in New York (at least, according to whatever IP address data vendor a platform is using), you're unable to watch the New York Knicks using league-sanctioned products. That's the US version of this—restricting access to the content itself to protect the rights holder's revenue. It's internal logic and fundamentally sound (though infuriating) if you're one of them.
This is without a doubt categorically worse. A blackout says "you can't watch this game" and Spain is saying "you can't access the internet while this game is on, whether you're interested in the game or not." It's as if the NBA convinced the DOJ to shut down half the internet every time a game was on, just in case.
Before it was DMCA notices (useless) -> lawsuits (whack-a-mole, check TorrentFreak) -> ??? -> infrastructure-level blocking. (I'm an outlier for many reasons but we won't go into those.) Each step is more destructive and less effective than the one preceding it. Spain has reached the end of the playbook, thanks to political interests: ban the internet!
Fans are the product. La Liga's real customer is Movistar, who pays roughly a billion euros a year for exclusivity so they can bundle it into packages nobody would pay for otherwise. The IP blocking isn't an anti-piracy measure—I'd argue there is no such thing as anti-piracy but that's a different thread. The IP blocking is a signal to the next bidder: the government will protect your exclusivity at any cost, even if that cost is the country's internet.
It is really €200/month? At what point is it cheaper to buy transportation and a ticket to see events in person?
This is how greed works. The players want as much money as they can get. The owners want to charge as much as they can for everything while paying the least possible amount. The networks that buy the broadcasting and other rights want to most they can charge for them.
Sports have gotten way out of hand, even without the betting aspect. People criticize gambling, porn, and other less desirable forms of entertainment while giving (commercialized) sports a free pass. It's not that different when you really get into it at this point.
>This is how greed works. The players want as much money as they can get. The owners want to charge as much as they can for everything while paying the least possible amount. The networks that buy the broadcasting and other rights want to most they can charge for them.
And the buyer wants to pay as little as they possibly can. That's not greed. That's called a market and it's functioning as it should.
The ones who pirate the sports broadcasts are in the right. Spectator sports are literally brainwashing: they hook into vestigial tribal instincts, reinforce them, and channel them for political goals - such as norm-setting, or extrajudicial violence.
Anyone who genuinely likes kickball because they derive exquisite pleasure from watching balls being kicked, can go watch it live. But no, it just has to reach right into people's living rooms, at the cost of disrupting productive activity. Imagine if people paid such enthusiastic attention to things that were not about "winning" and "losing" some completely imaginary competition. Imagine how much better their lives would've been!
yikes
The internet was a mistake anyway, they should just ban it completely and be done with it.
Ironically, I live in Spain, and at this very minute, there is a football game going on (Atlético Madrid vs Barcelona) which I literally just learned about because I could just hear my neighbors scream about the 0-1 score, and with Vodafone ISP I'm not experiencing the block of Cloudflare right now. https://hayahora.futbol/ also shows "NO" incorrectly (if you're being strict about the title+domain). I'm guessing it's specifically because it isn't a La Liga game, it's UEFA Champions League. At least ISPs aren't indiscriminately blocking things without court orders, which seems to have been specifically about La Liga.
> I'm guessing it's specifically because it isn't a La Liga game, it's UEFA Champions League
Probably just a matter of time. The article mentions:
"Lo bloqueos aplicarán "todos los días de emisión de eventos deportivos en directo", arrancando por primera vez con el partido de eliminatoria de la Champions League entre el Atlético de Madrid y el Barcelona que se celebra hoy martes 14 de abril."
Yeah, because I totally have control over who’s dubbing movies in France.
This is partly good because it forces development of ways to bypass this censorship.
Perhaps the frog is being boiled but the frog will learn to jump.
Or somebody will put a lid on the pot.
If you know Spain, you know this makes total sense:
- Half the country or more just doesn't work or do anything else when there's an important match anyway.
- There's a big intersection between "people that doesn't care about soccer" and "people that knows how to use a VPN"
- Matches are usually at night, past 7pm. It's well after the average citizen work hours.
- There's not really huge internet companies there that can lobby the other way around (e.g. infrastructure collapse because of the block).
So in short, the ruling is incredibly stupid because they're allowed to do so, save for the vocal minority, the vast majority of the population doesn't care: they're watching the match.
Quick reminder, it is not LaLiga (the football association) taking court action, but Telefónica the telco provider. In Spain their brand is Movistar, in UK and Germany more commonly known as O2. So there is something we, the consumer, can do - avoid all products Telefónica, in Spain and elsewhere to express the want for a free and uncensored internet.
It doesn't solve recording and uploading later... say a movie. So how does it even make sense?
You can bypass this censorship with Starlink. Starlink does not block access like spanish ISPs
Any word on if Starlink is being forced to comply? They have ISPs blocking DNS requests iirc, seems like Starlink may be a viable alternative?
Not that you should have to find a new ISP due to soccer being pirated too much, just wondering really
Edit: Oh...seems VPNs work. That's probably much easier as a work-around
So what does this mean in english?
Even more hours where people in Spain will have to wonder why their online apps/services are not working anymore I suppose.
Context, a few days ago, this was a very popular article on HN:
TL;DR: Spain blocks A LOT of CDNs during footy matches, including ALL of Cloudflare, thus breaking most of the internet. All in the name of stopping "pirates".Main ISP in Spain dynamically blocks IP it suspects sharing sport competition live streams. Began with football, now extended to other sports. Impact on legitimate traffic is real.
See this story from 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47738883
Basically, to combat pirate streaming of football matches, La Liga (the Spanish football association) can compel Spanish ISPs to block wide ranges of IP blocks that are suspected of hosting those streams.
This includes Cloudflare, which - due to lots of websites depending on them (see what happened when they went down last year: https://blog.cloudflare.com/18-november-2025-outage/ ) feels like half of the internet is unusable. This happens weekly when football is on.
Now it looks like those bans are going to become even more frequent, which will have all kinds of unintended consequences.
File "selling out your country's communication infrastructure to people filming other people kicking a ball around" under things science fiction writers failed to predict about capitalist dystopias.
Hey, that FIFA Peace Prize won't pay for itself!
You may enjoy the 1952 novel The Space Merchants by Pohl & Kornbluth.
Wtf? Just the other day I had chat about how stupid this is: they're blocking cloudflare to stop pirates!
So half the internet goes down, but pirates just.. Don't use cloudflare anymore.. Or use a proxy... Or use tor...
These policies cause nothing but collateral damage, and now apparently they've decided to cause some more of it!
Good job Spain.
CloudFlare loves pirates so much that they disclose loss of DMCA safe harbor protections as a material business risk on all their SEC filings. Piracy friendliness is key to their business model. It’s a risky position that no other large-scale CDN is willing to take.
Forcing piracy consumers to use Tor or other proxies is unlikely to be popular. They’ll still be used, for sure, but so long as CF makes pirated content easily accessible over the Internet, this is just going to keep happening. It’s just too damned convenient.
I don’t believe CF is going to win here, long term. If Spain and other countries block their ASNs, enough of their legitimate paying customers may start abandoning ship, and CF will have to get serious about unplugging notorious proxy configurations for piracy origin servers.
This is incredibly stupid, but don't laugh at Spaniards: your (and my) lawmakers are equally likely to enact similarly stupid laws. It's mind-boggling how stupid the world can be sometimes.
They pass stupid laws with impunity here in America.
Sadly, an alien viewing our behavior would deduce a rule such as: as long as the voter is the same tribe as the candidate, the voter must vote for candidate no matter how corrupt.
It describes hierarchy and power more than it does intelligence
> how stupid the world can be
This isn't stupidity. It's corruption.
>enact similarly stupid laws.
No new law was enacted. The ISPs are enforcing a court order.
Time to block your gov sites as well
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Should also block themselves from dubbing stuff into spanish, they are horrible, thanks god southamerica has many talented spanish dubbers
Don't let me start on your 'neutral' dub where everything reminds me on either Cantinflas or El Chavo.
Once you dub, you can't stop. I'm glad Netherlands doesn't do dubbing. Helps general foreign language profiency, I suppose, and near every Dutch person speaks English quite reasonably.
Subtitles all the way. Only advantages of dubbing I can see is accessibility for vision impaired and employment opportunity for local VA talent.
But dubbed live action media is such a horrid experience for me.
Yes yes, Spain sucks a lot. Please stay in Venezuela, well away of our awfulness.
Vice versa for most Spaniard opinions on South American Spanish dubs.
Being objective, both sides of the pond have produced many shitty Spanish dubs and some good ones, and unless there's too much difference for a given series we all just prefer our native dub.
Too bad the article isn't paywalled, or it could be a moment to have a talk about HN's own standard-operating-procedure piracy.
When it comes to piracy and anti-piracy, there is greed and stupidity on all sides.
I can't feel bad when the subscription circumvention uses the same method they use to get their stuff to rank high in search results. News pages want their content indexed, so they can pull a bait and switch.
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Well, Spain was a dictatorship as recently as 1975.
Gentle reminder that we have a gag law that subtly undermines the right to strike as well as give full and total power to police to do whatever they want if they deem your actions a "disrespect" or "disobedience" without giving explanation to anyone.
I'm starting to thing the final goal is just to stop "the world" so watching the advertisements with a side of sports is the only thing left to do lmao, wonder how they'll justify banning reading during matches.
Now they only have to spread all games across the full week, to make it even better. /s
XKCD needs a new comic release, replacing "compiling" to "sports"...
https://xkcd.com/303/
It's always hilarious to see HN users claim how the "quality of life" is so much better in the EU than the USA. When in reality most of them only ever visit a handful of EU first-tier cities for short vacations or business trips, and never have to deal with the reality of living and working under an oppressive bureaucratic state.
As stupid and terrible as this is, this is certainly a lesser evil compared to minimal worker's rights, non-existent public transportation, no legally guaranteed parental leave/vacation/sick time, paying tens of thousands of dollars for healthcare, a ~5x+ higher violent crime rate, wasting billions of taxpayer money on sending missiles into schools while infrastructure crumbles, etc. etc. A country does not need to be perfect to have higher quality of life than the US, that's for sure.
I'd trade "not being able to access Cloudflare-websites for some hours per week" over "My neighbors can't afford healthcare, there is no public transport for anyone nor can I walk to a cafe on the other side of town", but we all have different priorities :)
Don't get me wrong, it sucks, makes no sense and I hate the responsible people for it, but in the grand scheme of things, Spain does have a higher quality of life than so many other places out in the world, most important, way higher than the country you're comparing it to, on almost any useful metric.
> never have to deal with the reality of living and working under an oppressive bureaucratic state.
I see that you have never had to deal with the US government.
In other news NY is working on banning air guns that are not transparent or brightly colored and have plugged barrels. Yes plugged, making them useless.
Which oppressive bureaucratic state are we talking about again?
The USA consistently ranks outside the top 10 countries in Quality of Life by any reputable metric.
Well, there are lots of EU countries where governments aren't as idiotic as that of Spain, and where bureaucracy is mostly under control as well.
As a citizen of a Nordic country I would never want to live in America, except maybe if I was rich. Especially for people with children my country offers a superior quality of life in many ways.
Rage bait as it is; please stay over there in the US, I will stay here in Spain. I will live with this 'opression' that I have to read about on HN to notice. All good!
Having worked in both the US and EU, I can tell you the quality of life is vastly better in the EU.
US does have some perks for sure. But there are so many issues of its own and those issues are almost always pushed downwards to the most vulnerable groups. Which means, on average, you do end up with a better quality of life outside the US.
Conversely, most Europeans praising the USA have mostly been to California or New York, and rarely to Ohio or Alabama
The HOA, the ICE, 1984 like scans in the airports even as a tourist, lack of basic healthcare...
Yeah, you live in the paradise...
Assuming that "piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem" is still the prevailing wisdom, what is Spain / La Liga doing wrong that sports piracy is so prevalent as to warrant this? It seems like a no-brainer to expand stream availability and charge appropriately for it vs. scheduling daily kneecaps of other economic activity.
LaLiga has the same kind of attitude and culture as the RIAA. Interpret their words and actions accordingly.
Football in Spain is usually sold by what used to be cable tv (now a mix of cable + Netflix-like streaming). Usually to get access to matches you need the most expensive package, which includes a bajillion services and might even be tied to a cell/internet provider. Footbal is their "killer feature" that enables 200 euro subscriptions.
They also sell "business access", so pubs can show the match, since going to the bar for a beer is the go-to choice for those who can't afford to watch at home.
> "piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem"
I never buy into this. If copyright law doesn't exist, pirate sites will eventually always provide better service than the official channels.
One example is scanlation manga. Chinese scanlation sites have reached the theoretical ceiling of service: just serve images fast with a little nonintrusive ad. No login required. No way the official Japanese apps can provide significant better service than that.
Piracy is for teenagers and poor people.
Is it not a pricing problem? Spotify is relatively cheap and has all the music. For the same video coverage I need 5+ streaming services that all increase prices significantly faster than inflation. This is just private equity over squeezing?
This seems like they are aiming to increase profit margins instead of increasing the supply and decreasing the price. Considering that increasing the supply is trivial in digital products, maybe they are competing in a saturated market?
Spaniards attitudes can be quite different from the American ones, Americans just pay for everything for convenience, in Spain you probably need to match the price of the IPTV to steal their customers.
Apparently IPTV costs 20 to 60 Euros per year, the legal option is over 100 euros per month.
To match the IPTV they need 20x price reduction. This would mean that they need sign in 20x more Spaniards to break even with the current situation. Are there 20x more Spaniards pirating the LaLiga than paying? Even in Spain I don’t think so.
Piracy isn't a service problem. Many people just want to consume media for free. It's true that poor service can exacerbate piracy, but even a good service isn't enough to dissuade pirates. Games that are completely convenient to download on Steam are still pirated.
Some people are pushed to pirate on account of bad service, sure. But plenty of others are more than willing to tolerate worse service to receive a product for free.
> Assuming that "piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem" is still the prevailing wisdom
I don't have experience with broadcast media (in Spain, especially) but I a little experience on the software side: I could not believe the lengths some people would go to in order to avoid paying even $5-10 for useful software. Hours of work, sketchy cracks, downloading things from websites likely to compromise their system. Some of them would become irate when the software was updated and broke their cracks, spending time complaining loudly on forums and social media or even trying to threaten developers. The strangest part is when they start posting from social media where you can see things like their $3,000 gaming PC build, but if they see a chance to avoid paying $10-20 for something they will take it.
It becomes culturally embedded in some bubbles: If it's possible to find a way to avoid paying and there are no consequences for trying, some people will go for it.
I don't even buy the "it's a service problem" argument either. I have a friend who loves to watch sports games but refused to pay for any services. He will spend 30 minutes jumping from one website to the next enduring crazy amounts of ads, pop-ups, and attempts to get him to install things on his computer until finally getting to a blocky stream that drops out every few minutes. He can easily afford to pay, but getting things without paying is basically a little game he likes to play.
Monopoly: It is not just "LaLiga" who stands to lose money, it is Telefonica/Movistar which is the only owner of most of sports right in Spain, and they know they can set the price they want because
+ Most people are not savy enough to pirate/are unwilling to do it for fear.
+ The more fear they instil, the keener those people are to pay.
+ Most bars where it is available will rise prices to sustain their loss. It starts at 300Eu/(month screen) (notice the product in the denominator), and having.
+ Woe to you if you own a bar and the police get you pirating. Woe indeed, the fine will be unimaginable...
Monopoly does this to the markets. Movistar (Telefonica) is the de-facto owner of high-stakes sports in Spain. This means Football (Spanish league, Champions League), Tennis (all the Masters and Grand Slams), Basketball, you name it.
They are also the main telco in Spain, so they own the service and the channel.
They don't stream on YouTube.
It’s very easy to watch pirated streams, it’s insanely complicated to reliably watch the official streams.
This is what we call throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
At what point does spanish internet become too unreliable? There was a thread the other day about someone's CI jobs failing due too this.
when connected health device cause a death I guess
Eh, if they block things when every sport or any movie is being shown, it will be reliable. Reliably blocked. :P
There was a case two weeks ago about someone unable to locate their missing parent with a tracking application (I'm assuming the parent has some sort of dementia) because the application could not connect to the servers. Link in spanish https://hipertextual.com/actualidad/los-bloqueos-de-laliga-e...
Can Spaniards work around this with a VPN? I know that causes other issues though.
To what degree is it feasible for a startup to move around in Europe? This is the sort of heavy-handed, tech-illiterate, authoritarian activity that might make me seriously consider moving my infrastructure or headquarters if I was a Spanish startup.
I did manage with Cloudflare's WARP, now is called Cloudflare One [1] because the 1.1.1.1 DNS
- [1]https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/team-and-re...
Yes, that's the funny thing, the people that want to pirate sports are still unaffected. In fact, one of the most famous pages to pirate soccer matches doesn't get blocked during this lockdowns
IPs are blocked at Spanish internet provider level, the problem would be if you have customers in Spain, but it doesn't matter where you move your infra, if your ip is in one of the affected IP blocks, customers from Spain won't be able to reach no matter in what country is placed (what happened with docker pull )
> This is the sort of heavy-handed, tech-illiterate, authoritarian.
Totally agree with this, it's ridiculous and a shame.
I personally don't use any infrastructure provider from Spain, but you wouldn't solve any problem moving out, and also those providers are not the ones to blame or punish. Only customer connecting from Spain are affected where is the infrastructure does not solve the problem.
Yes, works with any VPN.
Also, it takes 10 minutes to find a valid football stream, even without a VPN. Such is life.
I spend a lot of time every year in Spain. VPNs work but sometimes you are forget about those Internet outages and are wondering why some services suddenly stop working. Some of them stop working in mysterious ways as well (for example if they host just some resources on Cloudflare).
It's frankly ridiculous because it's very easy to use a VPN and stream w/e anyway. I don't watch football, tennis or golf but I use VPN regularly to watch Australian TV.
Seems obvious at this point there needs to be EU-level regulations against individual countries, such as Spain and Italy, implementing these absurd restrictions. It would at least make lobbying from those sports companies more difficult. These same companies have been pushing for banning VPNs -- consumer VPNs -- as they easily circumvent half the internet going dark because of some dumb sports event, and they're going to be targeted next when everyone's using them. It doesn't help "piracy" always ends up being an excellent excuse to undermine everyone's privacy.
The EU is more likely to enact more censorship than other way.
> there need to be EU-level regulations against individual countries, such as Spain and Italy, implementing these absurd restrictions
Why should other EU members care what websites Spain allows their citizens to access? Does the "EU" even have authority for such a thing?
The EU is in favour of this kind of rubbish, as is the UK. We need to kick these idiots out of power.
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I would say the root problem is not someone seeking to prevent piracy but rather the fact that so many services are clustered behind the same proxy / CDN service (e.g. Cloudflare).
That in my view is what needs to be regulated and Cloudflare designated as a “gatekeeper” with all the responsibilities to go with that.
La Liga would never be able to secure blanket bans if people and services were more decentralised
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> Seems obvious at this point there needs to be EU-level regulations against individual countries, such as Spain and Italy, implementing these absurd restrictions.
I don't think there is EU-level "regulation" in this specific thing. However there is something somewhat better: European Convention on Human Rights. It's just that challenging these kind of bans via that route is very slow (similar how slow it is to challenge the laws which go against the Constitution in the US via Supreme Court).
As a europe federalist, I would think it is more likely EU would implement these restrictions itself instead of step against Spain.
if they were serious about stopping piracy, they'd ban computers outright.
That's coming. The death knell is sounding for general purpose computing in the developed world. And nothing can be done about it.
If I ever start watching football, I'll make sure to pirate every match. FIFA, La Liga, they all seem utterly rotten to me.
It will take years before the effect will be felt but I do believe since watching football has become so expensive younger generations are going to watch less of it.
If you think FIFA is rotten, remember their Peace Prize.
‘Rotten’ isn’t a strong enough insult.
Just how much money is in all that?
Normalized revenue for LaLiga itself in 2025 was 5.4 billion (american billion) euros
Probably not that much, but it's money of influential people, so the rest must suffer.
Are people on the streets or is this some Franco-Pavlovian reflex kicking in?
Net neutrality used to be a pillar of the EU internet. 2026; the mind fucking boggles.
Its football, so no people are not in the streets, they are watching tv.
The page claims that the streaming of these sports events 'jams' the Internet in Spain. I am guessing that's just a bogus excuse, and that doesn't even happen; am I wrong?
Every time just around the time I forget how much I hate football, these fucks come up out of nowhere with something exceptionally corrupted and remind me that they still exist.
FWIW there are tools specifically to test the impact. I hope to read reports from https://ooni.org soon.
News like this makes you realize that these countries have just given up entirely on the idea of progress or innovation. Peak tourist town mentality.
> The announcement speaks of blocking domains, URLs and IP addresses, the latter of which affects legitimate services if the addresses belong to CDN services such as Cloudflare.
> La información habla tanto de bloqueos de dominios, URLs y de direcciones IP, caso este último que, cuando se produce, afecta a servicios legítimos si se trata de direcciones pertenecientes a servicios CDN como Cloudflare.
Another casualty of the centralized internet of our time
I ran a sports streaming service ("pirated sports streaming service" ?). The US Government said I was making $250k MRR as a solo indie dev (I wasn't, but that's great validation). I'm pretty qualified to talk about this.
The shitty part about what Spain is doing is that it punishes its own residents who have nothing to do with piracy.
Sports piracy is fundamentally different than music or movie piracy. The Spotify analogy that gets tossed around is wrong. Steam is less wrong but still wrong. Music piracy got "solved" because the labels decided that some revenue was better than no revenue, and the math works when you have a bunch of product in your back pocket that cost you nothing to distribute; gaben made piracy slightly less convenient to those in developed countries.
Sports rights are valuable because they're exclusive and because they're live. In the US, there are blackouts around sports: if you're physically located in New York (at least, according to whatever IP address data vendor a platform is using), you're unable to watch the New York Knicks using league-sanctioned products. That's the US version of this—restricting access to the content itself to protect the rights holder's revenue. It's internal logic and fundamentally sound (though infuriating) if you're one of them.
This is without a doubt categorically worse. A blackout says "you can't watch this game" and Spain is saying "you can't access the internet while this game is on, whether you're interested in the game or not." It's as if the NBA convinced the DOJ to shut down half the internet every time a game was on, just in case.
Before it was DMCA notices (useless) -> lawsuits (whack-a-mole, check TorrentFreak) -> ??? -> infrastructure-level blocking. (I'm an outlier for many reasons but we won't go into those.) Each step is more destructive and less effective than the one preceding it. Spain has reached the end of the playbook, thanks to political interests: ban the internet!
Fans are the product. La Liga's real customer is Movistar, who pays roughly a billion euros a year for exclusivity so they can bundle it into packages nobody would pay for otherwise. The IP blocking isn't an anti-piracy measure—I'd argue there is no such thing as anti-piracy but that's a different thread. The IP blocking is a signal to the next bidder: the government will protect your exclusivity at any cost, even if that cost is the country's internet.
It is really €200/month? At what point is it cheaper to buy transportation and a ticket to see events in person?
This is how greed works. The players want as much money as they can get. The owners want to charge as much as they can for everything while paying the least possible amount. The networks that buy the broadcasting and other rights want to most they can charge for them.
Sports have gotten way out of hand, even without the betting aspect. People criticize gambling, porn, and other less desirable forms of entertainment while giving (commercialized) sports a free pass. It's not that different when you really get into it at this point.
>This is how greed works. The players want as much money as they can get. The owners want to charge as much as they can for everything while paying the least possible amount. The networks that buy the broadcasting and other rights want to most they can charge for them.
And the buyer wants to pay as little as they possibly can. That's not greed. That's called a market and it's functioning as it should.
The ones who pirate the sports broadcasts are in the right. Spectator sports are literally brainwashing: they hook into vestigial tribal instincts, reinforce them, and channel them for political goals - such as norm-setting, or extrajudicial violence.
Anyone who genuinely likes kickball because they derive exquisite pleasure from watching balls being kicked, can go watch it live. But no, it just has to reach right into people's living rooms, at the cost of disrupting productive activity. Imagine if people paid such enthusiastic attention to things that were not about "winning" and "losing" some completely imaginary competition. Imagine how much better their lives would've been!
yikes
The internet was a mistake anyway, they should just ban it completely and be done with it.
Ironically, I live in Spain, and at this very minute, there is a football game going on (Atlético Madrid vs Barcelona) which I literally just learned about because I could just hear my neighbors scream about the 0-1 score, and with Vodafone ISP I'm not experiencing the block of Cloudflare right now. https://hayahora.futbol/ also shows "NO" incorrectly (if you're being strict about the title+domain). I'm guessing it's specifically because it isn't a La Liga game, it's UEFA Champions League. At least ISPs aren't indiscriminately blocking things without court orders, which seems to have been specifically about La Liga.
> I'm guessing it's specifically because it isn't a La Liga game, it's UEFA Champions League
Probably just a matter of time. The article mentions:
"Lo bloqueos aplicarán "todos los días de emisión de eventos deportivos en directo", arrancando por primera vez con el partido de eliminatoria de la Champions League entre el Atlético de Madrid y el Barcelona que se celebra hoy martes 14 de abril."
Yeah, because I totally have control over who’s dubbing movies in France.
This is partly good because it forces development of ways to bypass this censorship.
Perhaps the frog is being boiled but the frog will learn to jump.
Or somebody will put a lid on the pot.
If you know Spain, you know this makes total sense:
- Half the country or more just doesn't work or do anything else when there's an important match anyway.
- There's a big intersection between "people that doesn't care about soccer" and "people that knows how to use a VPN"
- Matches are usually at night, past 7pm. It's well after the average citizen work hours.
- There's not really huge internet companies there that can lobby the other way around (e.g. infrastructure collapse because of the block).
So in short, the ruling is incredibly stupid because they're allowed to do so, save for the vocal minority, the vast majority of the population doesn't care: they're watching the match.
Quick reminder, it is not LaLiga (the football association) taking court action, but Telefónica the telco provider. In Spain their brand is Movistar, in UK and Germany more commonly known as O2. So there is something we, the consumer, can do - avoid all products Telefónica, in Spain and elsewhere to express the want for a free and uncensored internet.
It doesn't solve recording and uploading later... say a movie. So how does it even make sense?
You can bypass this censorship with Starlink. Starlink does not block access like spanish ISPs
Any word on if Starlink is being forced to comply? They have ISPs blocking DNS requests iirc, seems like Starlink may be a viable alternative?
Not that you should have to find a new ISP due to soccer being pirated too much, just wondering really
Edit: Oh...seems VPNs work. That's probably much easier as a work-around