I was unaware of this controversy so in brief:

1. La Liga (Spanish Football) finds pirates streaming their games objectionable

2. They notice that many of these streamers use Cloudflare for something, presumably CDN and load balancing.

3. They appear in court in Spain and get an ex-parte TRO blocking all Cloudflare IPs. (Ex parte TRO: restraining order granted without Cloudflare being summoned to court)

4. Based on this, they tell ISPs to block pretty much all of Cloudflare in Spain.

5. Cloudflare goes public in frustration, noting that they could just send take down requests for infringing content like every other rights holder in the world, and that many Spanish utilities and civil resources use Cloudflare.

Interesting. My gut is that it’s hard to beat La Liga on their home turf, as evidenced by not even being invited to the court hearings which shut you down across all of Spain.

Long term, I’d guess CF wins this one? Probably they will have to escalate in some way to Eurozone courts, although I have no idea how this might work. No cloud business could meet the standard put forward by La Liga; but also there are only so many CDN companies. Meantime I guess illegal streamers can move to Google and see which legal group wins that battle.

I live in Spain, while I find the whole "life-threatening" narrative a tad overblown: I agree these obnoxious blocks are unacceptable. Incredible how much power LaLiga is capable of wielding.

Many will disagree here, but I really respect Cloudflare fight against government-enabled censorship and abuse of power by anti-piracy whatever.

Yes, sometimes CloudFlare used for some actually bad stuff, but same can be said for any cloud service. Having major internet infrastructure provider react to every whim of every single government in the world is not a good idea.

sounds like centralising most of the the internet behind a single easy target (Cloudflare) is a bad idea

I was always unsure about cloudflare as an end user - I don’t want all my traffic going through one provider, but their business use case seemed reasonable.

Then my in-laws got tricked into sending login credentials to a phishing page fronted by cloudflare. It was obviously spoofing IDP logins of Yahoo, Microsoft, etc. I sent a request assuming they would disable the domain and it was immediately closed (in minutes) as not an issue. It made no sense that they would want to front phishing sites. I eventually got them to look more closely and it was removed, but it soured my perception of them.

I think large scale internet businesses may need to start having more liability in matters like this. Being blocked from an entire country seems extreme, but if there are financial incentives to solve the problem, the problem will get solved.

Of course it could claim lives. Hopefully Prince has considered people have also likely died as a result of Cloudflare's repeating captcha which holds the next page in front of you like a carrot on a stick, never letting you know that you will be clicking that box forever.

I'm sure while someone's in the process of keeling over is the perfect time to arbitrarily scrutinize their connecting details. You need to contact your doctor ASAP. Okay, but did you neighbor have a virus last week? Is your neighborhood in your city more "problematic" than average? You may have forgot to check these details before you fell ill.

Cloudflare sites should come with a big banner warning all users their connection will be arbitrarily approved by an algorithm with chilling effects built in as dark patterns.

Last I checked, Cloudflare does basically no educating of customers how badly their website will be broken for users arbitrarily when they don't use the ISP or browser Cloudflare likes. No explanation for how many customers you will lose when your website can't be visited by someone who doesn't know how to change their IP, no explanation that if you're offering a critical service then Cloudflare will give that service thousands of tiny downtimes left unknown, the screams too quiet to carry the weight of a tech CEO worried about something similar.

I see so many people in these threads always complain about Cloudflare or Google CAPTCHA loops.. but even when using Private Internet Access (one of the most abused VPNs), I rarely if ever got on a full-on loop. Maybe Google CAPTCHA made me solve 3 things instead of one. Cloudflare is always just a checkbox. And I have my Brave and Firefox profiles hardened.

I'm not saying you aren't experiencing this, but I am curious: what is your setup that Cloudflare and Google treat you with such suspicion / hostility?

And then the Spanish high sea robbers will just find other routes while the regular people will keep wondering why their bank doesn't work.

Football is the cancer on European societies and economies. From low level hooligans literally bullying and beating children, to high level infuence on the broadcasting infrastructure. Sell it all to Saudis for billions of trillions and ship the football stadiums overseas as a bonus.

I live in Spain and love LaLiga games, but I dislike the executives. There's no straightforward way to stream all matches. The Cloudflare/piracy issue is the lack of clear streaming options. Even with DAZN, Movistar Plus, and TVBar, none offer complete coverage.

So on the one hand I am sympathetic. On the otherhand, I'm also pretty sure cloudflare won't take down pirated stuff, so what do they expect?

I don't like the way that large football conglomerates abuse copyright, but then those same rules _should_ be open to me for anything I produce. The main difference is I don't have a team of lawyers.

Actually, this is a Cloudflare problem - simply take extra steps to ensure your clients paying for your services aren’t harmed by natural market forces.

If you read between the lines, he’s claiming people will die because Cloudflare doesn’t want to take the time, effort, or money to fix the problem that they easily could by creating a separate system for critical services.

This type of “tech hypochondria” should be absolutely dragged at every opportunity. This guy runs a business and whines that his clients don’t deserve what his business agrees to provide? FOH with that ish mang I ain’t buying it.

I never watched sports but my kids want to, so tried to buy them subscription to some sport broadcaster.

Bundesliga, F1, NHL and FIFA world cup, that's all I (they) needed.

It turned to total mess. Service A shows F1 but not NHL. Service B shows NHL but not all NHL, only games where my city team plays. Some show LaLiga but not Bundesliga. All cost $30/mo but still show ads. Periodically they show ads instead of the event. If they can't, they split screen show the event in a little rectangle that's 25% of screen space. Dazn, TSN, ESPN are all total scam. You can see a lot of bull riding though.

We cancelled all this nonsense and just moved to pirate sites. Screw this bs.

He's been complaining a lot about Portugal on Twitter too.

https://x.com/eastdakota

How come no one is mentioning the obvious solution -- LaLiga needs to make their product as easy to access as piracy. If they offered worldwide streaming of the matches available on an easy interface at a reasonable price, then none of this would be a problem.

Piracy is almost never about the price -- it's almost always about the availability. Especially when it comes to live sports.

I live in Spain and my ISP is Digi, which uses the network from Telefonica. These blocks are incredibly frustrating, and a ton of people have noticed websites and services not working. However, because the block lasts some hours, people don't know what is happening: "is my mobile network bad?", "Is the website down?". They try a few hours later and it's back up, so they move on.

My company's website is behind Cloudflare and I discovered this whole situation because someone couldn't access it. Also my home assistant is not accessible from the internet the days with a match. And we use it to open the garage and the house. We learned the lesson the hard way being locked outside until I managed to connect with a VPN. This is just nuts and incredibly frustrating. And for La Liga we are just a bunch of "frikis" (nerds) complaining about it... because we are the only ones that understand what the problem is.

Unfortunately, someone would have to die and a lawsuit to follow, and maybe that could stop this crazy nonsense. E.g. A few days ago I read about someone with diabetes whose device was malfunctioning because of these blocks.

Football company has authority to block IP addresses?

Why does CloudFlare have these problems and other CDNs like CloudFront and Akamai don’t?

Ignoring the Spain block for a while, I wonder how/why these piracy sites use Cloudflare. Are they using something like R2 or Stream? This means someone still has to pay for it, right?

I am somehow out of the loop about why Cloudflare is as big as it is? There are many other CDNs, why them?

Maybe they should separate vetted services behind different IP ranges. Or even company. And put in place massive financial penalties for those services if for any reason because of them they have to block traffic.

Very telling how the article ends with a snippet about how the previous season had record-breaking revenues and how La Liga is one of the most profitable sports competitions in the world. It is never enough.

I wonder why the site owners and the users who are affected by such broad and indiscriminate blocking will not sue LaLiga AND the judges for damages and violation of freedom of speech?

I seem to recall news a while back about how cloudflare was very deliberately making it impossible to block only some things they provide, specifically for the purpose of causing any blocks to have enough blast radius to cause popular outrage. At the time it was presented in terms of fighting back against political censorship.

Sometimes I wonder if people know who Matthew Prince is... Matthew is not someone you want to fight with.

This is the second time I have seen an article on this topic that talks about "LaLiga" without ever defining it. As if ordinary people outside of Europe are expected to know what LaLiga is.

They also did it to Vercel.

Paella and sol heh, not CDN's

This goes to Spain government (Nazi-like behavior has long tradition there) and Spain citizens letting laws, which allows this, to pass. Because same law was or will be used to block opposition, etc.

Of course, that similar organizations (paid by huge copyright companies) tried the same in my country. And luckily our government listens to local experts (NIC.cz and others) and not to mention, pirating has big tradition here. So they failed to pass this ridiculous law. (blocking IP addresses)

The crux of the matter is that Cloudflare keep providing their protection service to huge piracy sites, for instance archive.is

It's a taste of his own medicine. Having your entire service blocked due to a portion of it being illegal is not much different to how he personally terminated service for 8chan due to a portion of it he claimed was illegal.

Here's the actual tweet:

https://xcancel.com/eastdakota/status/1924969551478804543