Spain blocks pirate soccer sites, affecting millions of innocent sites
Cloudflare CEO: Football Piracy Blocks Will Claim Lives; 'I Pray No One Dies' * TorrentFreak
https://torrentfreak.com/cloudflare-ceo-football-piracy-blocks-will-claim-lives-i-pray-no-one-dies-250526/
Cloudflare Asks Court to End LaLiga's 'Illegal' Blocking Response to Encrypted Client Hello * TorrentFreak
La Liga has been concerned about the illegal distribution of soccer matches and has asked the court to block illegal distribution sites. Ultimately, La Liga won several court orders and gained the authority to instruct ISPs to block illegal distribution sites. As a result, La Liga has been carrying out large-scale blocking almost every week since February 2025.
The major ISP targeted in this case was Cloudflare. Since many illegal distribution sites use Cloudflare and illegal distribution sites keep coming back as different sites even after measures are taken, La Liga took the drastic measure of blocking based on Cloudflare's shared IP addresses in an attempt to wipe out the illegal distribution sites.
However, blocking shared IP addresses would not only block illegal sites, but also millions of unrelated sites that use Cloudflare, which resulted in many sites hosted on Cloudflare becoming inaccessible from Spain.
Cloudflare offers its own anti-piracy tools, but La Liga reportedly did not use them and instead asked for them to be blocked by other means. It is unclear what exactly Cloudflare asked for, and on what basis, but after Cloudflare refused to cooperate, La Liga appears to have decided to block Cloudflare outright.
Cloudflare protested and took La Liga to court, arguing that the widespread blocking was illegal, but the blocking will continue until the end of the 2024/2025 season, and remains so at the time of writing.
La Liga has strongly criticized Cloudflare for this incident, arguing that 'Cloudflare's refusal to cooperate was at fault, and if excessive blocking occurred as a result, Cloudflare should be held responsible.'
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said, 'This blockade has denied access to just under 150 illegal streaming sites, but has affected millions of innocent websites. Many sites in Spain rely on Cloudflare, including small and medium-sized businesses and essential emergency services. If the blockade continues, it is only a matter of time before Spanish people will lose access to life-saving emergency services. We hope that no one dies.'
A huge percentage of the Internet sits behind us, including small businesses and emergency resources in Spain. We've always been happy and willing to work with rights holders in conjunction with judicial bodies to protect their content. We have a clear process that works around…
— Matthew Prince 🌥 (@eastdakota) May 20, 2025
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